With sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram developing faster than ever, society can no longer ignore how social media saturates our daily lives. When considering this social media phenomenon on a college campus, the shift from face-to-face communication to screen-mediated communication is revolutionizing the way college administrators engage with students—from their first campus visit to graduation day.

“The interaction between Messiah College and its students that takes place on social media is extremely important to the life of the institution. Students are able to have a voice because of the transparency and two-way communication that is created by social media and feel like a valued part of the life at the college,” says Ethan Eshbach ’14.

The admissions office has noticed a trend in high school students that visit Messiah’s campus. “Social media is popular and pervasive with high school students. With social media and mobile devices, they are always ‘on,’” says John Chopka, vice president for enrollment management. “While it has become a preferred way to communicate with friends, organizations like ours need permission to enter that world.” (more…)

For most people, Hershey, Pa. means delicious chocolate, thrilling amusement park rides and the philanthropist Milton Hershey. However, for Megan Keller ’13, the real story lies deeper than the tourist attractions and candy bars. The story of Hershey, engrained in its rich history, provides a deeper look at the industrious workers that brought this town its fame. Keller found a way to intertwine this story and her Messiah College education to develop and produce a mobile application that narrates a historical walking tour through downtown Hershey.

As a history major with a social studies certification, Keller took many classes that challenged her to engage in public history, a process that makes history more accessible to an average person. For her public history class last fall, Keller was challenged to consider an exhibit that would bring history to anyone. Keller knew she could take it one step further than doing something traditional and expected like building a Colonial exhibit. (more…)

You might not expect a historian of Medieval and Renaissance Europe to be among the first educators at Messiah College to volunteer to lead a pilot project exploring the impact of mobile technology—in this case, the iPad—on students’ ability to learn. But that’s exactly what happened.

Joseph Huffman, distinguished professor of European history, and the eight students in his fall 2011 Intermediate Latin course exchanged their paper textbooks for iPads loaded with the required texts, relevant apps, supplementary PDFs and a Latin-English dictionary. The primary goal was to advance the learning of Latin. The secondary goal was to determine whether the use of the iPad improved, inhibited or did not affect their ability to learn a foreign language. (more…)

A Messiah College cross-departmental team has developed the College’s first mobile smart phone application. Designed primarily as a resource for prospective students and their parents, the easy-to-navigate app named “iMessiah” displays a sleek visual design and cutting-edge functionality that all audiences will find useful.

Messiah programmer Jonathan Wheat wrote the underlying code for the app that includes an event calendar, a department directory, sports scores, regional transportation information, and College news.  The app has tap-screen and one-touch dialing capabilities as well as several high-tech capabilities that are not available in many other college apps.

For example, an interactive 3-D campus map allows the user to choose a campus destination and then scrolls to pinpoint that exact location on the map, similar to Google maps. Also exclusive to iMessiah is the ability for prospective students to schedule a campus visit or fill out an admission application directly from their smart phones or iPads.

“Our goals is to provide a useful tool for prospective students that not only promotes the College but also helps bring them closer to the application process,” says Wheat.

The app is available for free download from the App Store to an iPhone or iPad.