Residence life and education, residential curriculum and curricular approaches, student housing, and technology.
Collecting and processing student feedback is crucial to ensuring that your department’s efforts are moving you toward your goals and serving students. Choosing the way in which this data is collected from your residents is just as important as what you do with it to take action. Below are some ways you can utilize Roompact... Continue Reading →
With COVID-19 changing the way we think of residence life, more and more schools are looking for diverse ways to build community, communicate important information, and engage residents. At Roompact, we've noticed a shift in our schools software usage to include more communications via text message. Text messaging can be an excellent tool to help... Continue Reading →
The COVID-19 pandemic represents a unique challenge for maintaining residential education and campus community in a time of social distancing and abrupt transitions to online and hybridized learning format. The role of residential education, however, is more critical than ever. Aiding students in identifying support networks, making connections with others, and the sharing of timely and... Continue Reading →
On Friday, April 3, ACPA and Roompact co-hosted a webinar to discuss ways residence life departments were utilizing RAs and student staff members to enrage with students and build community while residence hall operations are either closed or otherwise disrupted. The posted recording of the webinar is available for free below, after an initial registration... Continue Reading →
We’re big fans of Google Forms here at Roompact. We use it ourselves for meetings and whenever we’re gathering feedback from our team members. It is a really user friendly and simple tool that gets the job done. Within residence life and residential education, it has become more apparent that Google Forms is king. It... Continue Reading →
It is amazing how quickly our work has evolved in such a short period of time. As the above animated GIF shows (originally produced as a video by the team at BestReviews), many of our former paper-based and manual processes have moved to digital.  What is perhaps most striking is how so much of our lives have... Continue Reading →
The start of the academic year means that we welcome a new group of students to campus. It is a seminal time for many students, and their first year, in particular, can bring forward a number of rapid developmental changes. As peer leaders in their communities, resident assistants can heavily influence, and shape these student... Continue Reading →
Technology has always impacted the way we communicate, but within the past decade, this has accelerated. Folks in housing and residence life have witnessed some of these changes first hand, including students not reading or responding to email, roommate conflicts being addresses through chat apps, and bullying occurring on social media platforms. Mobile devices, cloud... Continue Reading →
Employing a Residential Curriculum entails building a residence life program that is learning-centered. Previous movements within residence life focused more narrowly on wellness or community. Moving towards a learning-centered orientation is often more intentional, more transformational, more holistic, and leads to better outcomes for students. Making this shift, however, does not necessarily entail that one doesn’t engage in education around issues of... Continue Reading →
Roompact "Perspective" posts are opportunities for individual staff members to work out ideas and provide their individual thoughts and opinions on a given topic. Now, more than ever, residence life professionals are competing for students' time. Technological change has brought about a revolution of choice for self directing one's learning and a multitude options for... Continue Reading →
At Roompact, we love technology. We are, after all, a software company. But we also love learning. Our main mission is to enhance the educational experience in the residence halls and to enhance learning for all students. We do this through providing both student and educator-facing tools. Sometimes our tools help make processes more efficient, so that... Continue Reading →
Integrating digital and social media tools into student staff training programs can be an exciting and innovative way to hold your staff' members' attention. Below are some useful sites, apps, and services that you can use and some examples of how to use them. Have other ideas? Poll Everywhere http://www.polleverywhere.com (alternative: sli.do) Poll Everywhere allows you to set... Continue Reading →
One of the most common and important features of modern software is the "tag." A tag is a short keyword or phrase that a user assigns to a piece of information that describes it in some way. You might also be familiar with hashtags, a form of tag used in social media (#thisisahashtag). Tags are... Continue Reading →
When I began my career in residence life, I remember one of my mentors giving me a manila folder full of photocopied handouts. These were handouts she collected from various conferences and colleagues that included sample forms and policies and ideas for icebreakers, teambuilders, and bulletin boards. Although the idea of sharing photocopies seems somewhat... Continue Reading →
As a residential education software company working with many different colleges and universities, Roompact designs its software in a way that can accommodate the range of approaches institutions can take to the learning process in the residence halls. One of the most interesting design challenges we have confronted is how to accommodate both residential curriculum models and category-based... Continue Reading →
Technology holds the promise to help housing and residence life professionals achieve their goals and work with students in a more efficient and effective manner. Deciding what your needs are and what software to purchase, however, requires professionals to approach the purchasing process with intentionality. The ACUHO-I Core Competencies state that when reviewing potential vendor... Continue Reading →
I came of age in residence life alongside digital technology and the World Wide Web. My first professional position was as a First Year Advisor in the Office of Residence Life and New Student Programs at Miami University 2002. At that time, our department was on the cutting edge. We had our own in-house-developed web... Continue Reading →
Higher education and student affairs professionals generally prefer the predictable. And yet, when it comes to engagement with students online, social media is the antithesis of control. For this reason, developing an effective digital engagement strategy in residence life, and in student affairs and higher education in general, requires a great degree of trust and a... Continue Reading →
