Virginia Tech shooting drives schools towards TTS Notification

More of these will be coming

Notre Dame installing warning system

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- The University of Notre Dame announced Monday it would install an emergency communication system that will allow school officials to contact large numbers of students and employees quickly in case of a campus crisis.

The move follows the Virginia Tech attack in which a student killed 30 people and himself.

"This spring's tragic mass shooting at Virginia Tech both saddened and startled those of us in higher education," said Gordon Wishon, Notre Dame's associate vice president and chief information officer. "We had an emergency communications project in the works, but Virginia Tech was an eye-opener. A lot of universities, Notre Dame included, put emergency communications systems at the top their IT project lists."

Notre Dame will use a technology service called Connect-ED, a service of The NTI Group in Sherman Oaks, Calif., that can reach students by voice or text messages by cell phone, office phones, home phones and e-mail addresses.

The system can send the same message to up to six telephone numbers per person and do text messaging, text-to-speech recognition, and voice-to-text recognition.

The school hopes to have the system working when the fall semester begins in August.