Did you know? Blackboard is involved in local partnerships to connect students to the global marketplace. The state of North Carolina, for example, urges schools to collaborate with national and international partners — such as Blackboard –to discover innovative strategies that will enable change and foster global connections.

Students@Work is a partnership project between the North Carolina Business Committee for Education (NCBCE) with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, which was created to focus on middle school students, as these years are a crucial point for preventing future drop outs. Roughly one in five North Carolina students will not graduate from high school in four years, and organizations like the NCBCE are working year round to change this number. The goal of Students@Work is to promote career awareness and establish a connection between students and potential employers.

As Hurricane Sandy continues to threaten communities along the East Coast with an expected landfall tonight near southern New Jersey, public sector institutions are rushing to prepare their communities. Sandy is a dangerous storm of potentially-historic proportions with expected storm surges, river flooding, and high winds impacting the most densely-populated coastal region in the country.

A key component of a crisis response strategy is communication – and that’s why it’s no surprise that, yesterday alone, Blackboard Connect clients sent over 6 million Sandy-related messages.

Here are some examples of institutions that have sent timely alerts:

• K-12 school districts from North Carolina to Massachusetts have used Blackboard Connect to cancel school today and tomorrow. Trick-or-treat or other Halloween activities are also being cancelled or postponed.
• Monmouth University in New Jersey cancelled classes today and tomorrow, and promised students that updates would be provided via Blackboard Connect.
• North Shore Alerts, a regional consortium serving multiple municipalities on Long Island, have issued a number of alerts over the weekend to prepare residents for Sandy, and urged residents to register their contact information with Blackboard Connect.
• Queen Anne’s County, Md., also recommended that residents register for Connect messages, and reminded them of the system’s utility in a recent closure of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

For K-12 school districts, colleges and universities, local municipalities and counties, and private companies, Blackboard Connect helps organizations prepare for nature’s worst.  With a decade of experience delivering critical messages, including during Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Ike, we’ve developed a strong set of best practices for communicating in hurricanes.

Last week as the storm menaced, we shared those best practices with clients in the impacted area. But you don’t have to be a Connect customer to benefit from this knowledge.  In fact, you can download the Blackboard Connect Hurricane Playbook today and put its advice into practice with in advance of Sandy’s landfall.

Another pro tip for Blackboard Connect users: if you’ve evacuated to a safe location, and need to send messages fast, our smartphone apps for message senders make it easy to get an alert out fast. Download the Android app or the iOS app today.

 

Update: Bb Connect sent another 6 million messages on Monday, Oct 29 – bringing the Sandy-related total to 12 million so far.

 

The student voice is a necessary and defining opinion in marketing and determining future initiatives on college campuses. For most universities, elections are held in order to democratically decide the representative to speak for the student population. After several years of limited turnout and lackluster campaigns, officials at West Lothian College decided to take advantage of the mobile student body and emerging mobile technologies by conducting student elections using the Blackboard ConnectTxt service, allowing student to vote for their candidates via text message.

For years it seemed, the rest of the world was hooked on SMS – while Americans were slow to adopt the technology. But is that really true today?  Is the US still behind, or have we caught up?

Consider: of the 5.6 trillion text messages sent around the world last year, 2.3 trillion were sent by Americans – that’s over 40 percent of total global SMS traffic.

Consider: the average US mobile subscriber sent over 660 texts annually – that’s more per capita than any other country on Earth.

Those are some of the remarkable statistics you can find in this infographic from Blackboard Connect, “Rising Text: Do you have the tools to meet the challenge?”

A seismic shift has occurred in the way Americans communicate – and it’s happened while we weren’t watching.  Sure, if you pay a teenager’s cell phone bill, you won’t be surprised to learn that young people send over 3,400 texts every month. But did you know that 65 percent of Americans say they ‘need’ SMS, and 45 percent say they can’t live without it?

The last month or two have been very busy for us. First, we launched a significant new product:  Blackboard Connect for Teachers, a mass notification tool for K-12 instructors. This new feature – available now to most Blackboard Connect clients – allows teachers to send phone messages to every child’s parent, in one of 22 languages. Next we announced the acquisition of Saf-T-Net, provider of the AlertNow service, which broadens our mass notification offerings and expands our K-12 client base.