Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/56523
Drama at the Door Earlier this year, the Temple University Fox School of Business in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, installed this 177-foot eight-color LED ticker from Rise Display in the student lounge of its new facility, Alter Hall. The large ticker—which can be viewed from the school's classrooms, Capital Markets trading room, and from the street— displays business headlines, stock quotes, university messages, and updates on the university-managed investment fund. A Web-based interface allows administrators to update ticker information from any Internet-connected device. "The ticker has garnered tremendous excitement from everyone who enters the building," says John DeAngelo, who recently retired as the school's associate dean for information technology business and management. "It really knocks everyone's socks off, and the students are very proud of it." TOOLS OF THE TRADE Interactive Team Rooms Boost Student Collaboration Many of today's technology-infused class- rooms allow multiple users to send information to a central computer screen for all to see. But what if technology allowed everyone to use a common screen as an extension of their own laptops? That is the concept behind TeamSpot, a collaborative technol- ogy developed by Tidebreak, a soft- ware company in Palo Alto, Califor- nia. Each TeamSpot room becomes an interactive wireless environment with a central common screen to which users can jump from their laptops, by moving their mouse arrows beyond the top of their own screens. In this way, participants can move files instantaneously to the common screen; all members of the group can notate and revise the common documents. The technology is also secure. Equipped with what the company calls "room awareness," the site allows only those present in the TeamSpot room to participate in a session. The software keeps a real-time record of the information exchanged during each session, which participants can access at a later time. Since January, the College of Busi- ness Administration at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville has been using TeamSpot as part of its Invest- ment Learning Center (ILC). For instance, students in the Bloomberg Certification course use TeamSpot to view data and conduct analyses on the Bloomberg terminal, explains Laura Wallis, a lecturer at the ILC. Other ILC students use TeamSpot to manage UTK's Haslam Torch Fund and LaPorte Torch Fund, two portfolios of securities. The interactive environment has increased their effi- ciency at producing quarterly reports of portfolio performance, says Wallis. Wallis has found that an interactive room doesn't just make the learn- ing environment more dynamic and flexible. It also removes traditional barriers to classroom participation, she adds. "Students no longer need to point at a screen and ask, 'What if the input period for the stock price was changed to weekly'? I no longer have to ask a student to 'go to the chalkboard' to work on a problem," she says. "Now, a student can control the main screen with his own laptop and mouse and show the rest of the class himself." Tidebreak also offers ClassSpot, a similar collaborative technology for instructional use. For more informa- tion about either product, visit www. tidebreak.com. n z BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2009 53