ACU To Give iPhone, iPod Touch to Freshmen

An Apple iPhone or iPod Touch will become a central part of Abilene Christian University's innovative learning experience this fall when all freshmen are provided one of these converged media devices, said Phil Schubert, ACU executive vice president.

At ACU - the first university in the nation to provide these cutting-edge media devices to its incoming class - freshmen will use the iPhones or iPod Touches to receive homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their professors' offices, and check their meal and account balances - among more than 15 other useful web applications already developed, said ACU Chief Information Officer Kevin Roberts.


ACU's innovative plans for this technology have attracted the attention of Apple executives and leaders at Ivy League universities. In fact, Roberts returned to Abilene Monday from Cupertino, Calif., where he was asked to present ACU's creative vision for converged media devices at Apple headquarters to executives and to selected leaders from universities including Harvard, Yale, MIT, Duke, Stanford, Oxford, Princeton and UCLA, Schubert said.