Newswise — With the countdown to back to school in full swing, university and college students new and old are preparing to head to their campuses. For many, that means saying goodbye to friends and family. For all it means embarking on the social experience of post-secondary education. Luckily for post-secondary students, innovators in the Ryerson Digital Media Zone have been busy all summer developing digitally based products and services to help students cope with going back to school:
Burstn: Keep in touch with old friends and make new onesCurrently available in the iPhone App Store, Burstn is a real-time image sharing platform that makes it fun and easy to share photos, including the GPS location information of where they were shot. Friends and family see their loved one’s photos instantly, the moment they’re snapped.
“The cool thing about Burstn for post-secondary students is that they can literally create a visual timeline of their college or university experience,” said Josh Davey, co-creator of the newly launched Burstn. “Your friends and family can follow you and receive live updates to their phones, or they can visit your own Burstn URL and view your photo stream with all your photos from oldest to newest, effectively archiving your life.”
Up-to-the-minute photos shared automatically on Facebook and Twitter let pictures do the talking with visual status updates. Burstn also offers such social networking tools as “liking” photos, tagging friends and adding captions. As adoption grows, students will also be able to discover and follow events on their campuses and in their cities.
“So often you miss out on seeing your friends’ photos because they sit on someone’s camera forever until they drudge up the motivation to upload them somewhere,” said Dave Senior, Burstn’s other co-creator. “With Burstn you just shoot the pictures and it does all the rest. Photos were meant to be shared – especially with those far away. This application definitely makes it easier to go away to school if you can see what your friends back home are up to and vice versa.”
For more information on Burstn, visit http://burstn.com.
TeamSave: Save your cash by getting more bang for your buckEvery student knows the importance of stretching a dollar as far as it will go. One way to pay less and get more is to shop as a group. Now an established group of friends on campus is no longer necessary to take advantage of group savings thanks to TeamSave.
TeamSave is a social buying platform that harnesses the power of group buying through social media. So even students brand new to the city can purchase an amazing local deal based on the power of volume shopping.
A quick subscription at www.TeamSave.com results in instant daily deal notifications through email. For 24 hours great products and services can be purchased at a fraction of the cost. Then tomorrow it starts all over again. Now students can afford to go out and meet new local friends! BACK TO SCHOOL @ RYERSON
SoapBox: Have your sayDeveloped in-house at Ryerson’s Digital Media Zone, SoapBox is an online platform for community-based change that allows users to place their ideas in the hands of key decision makers. The customized Ryerson SoapBox will be accessible to Ryerson students in time for the new academic year.
SoapBox is the tool to voice feedback, concerns, or general thoughts on the campus, community, or institution. Through a SoapBox tab on their my.ryerson portal, students can submit – and vote – on any idea, and in so doing, uncover the collective voice of a community. Using an agree or disagree format, students could use SoapBox to showcase their ideas about what the university is, isn't, or should be doing. By agreeing or disagreeing the community prioritizes its own issues. Ideas which achieve critical mass bubble up to the top where administrators can easily see them, respond to the community and then take the issues away to address and solve.
SoapBox is customizable for any organization looking to cultivate public opinion, with obvious applications for the political sector. For more information, visit www.hitsend.ca.
Ryerson MobileThe student-developed suite of campus management mobile apps, Ryerson Mobile, is back for its second year with updates and new apps for back-to-school. Here’s an overview of what’s new:
• Campus community members now have the ability to customize the order that the apps appear on their home screen.• The News and Schedule apps are now integrated with Blackboard, the University’s web-based course management system, so students can see recent news that the professor posts in blackboard.• Improved map application, including GPS positioning. See where you are in relation to the campus and navigate to your next class, a building, or a service on campus. • Count down to your next class with the updated Schedule app. Enjoy the new user interface and get to class on time.• A mobile version of SoapBox so students can post and vote on ideas from their mobile device.• A barcode reader that lets you scan the barcode located on a book and search the library catalogue to see the item's availability.
Ryerson’s Digital Media Zone, opened in April of this year, is a place where students and alumni come to innovate, collaborate and bring new products to market. Located atop Yonge-Dundas Square, the fully wired multidisciplinary loft space facilitates the research, development and commercialization of digitally-inspired business ideas from young entrepreneurs. Here students have access to the resources and educational support to launch their own businesses and essentially, their own careers. Though it has only been open a short time, the DMZ has seen such success and interest from students that the space is already being expanded. For more on the Digital Media Zone, visit http://www.ryerson.ca/news/media/spotlight/dmz/index.html
Ryerson University is Canada’s leader in innovative, career-oriented education and a university clearly on the move. With a mission to serve societal need, and a long-standing commitment to engaging its community, Ryerson offers close to 100 undergraduate and graduate programs. Distinctly urban, culturally diverse and inclusive, the university is home to 28,000 students, including 2,000 master’s and PhD students, nearly 2,700 tenured and tenure-track faculty and staff, and more than 130,000 alumni worldwide. Research at Ryerson is on a trajectory of success and growth: externally funded research has doubled in the past four years. The G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education is Canada's leading provider of university-based adult education. For more information, visit www.ryerson.ca.
For more Back to School resources, including tips and experts: http://www.ryerson.ca/news/media/spotlight/bts2010/
RSS