‘StudentTech’ adds color (and technology) to students’ lives

When students in Diane Frey’s Computers for Apparel Products classes needed to make black and white scarf designs more colorful, she remembered something she had heard from colleagues in the School of Family and Consumer Sciences.

Recalling their mention of BGSU’s Student Technology Center, Frey looked up the center on the Web and called to ask about its services. The upshot of her initiative was a hands-on workshop where roughly 35 of her students learned how their designs, created in the AutoCAD drafting program, could be colorized in Photoshop, a photo editing program.

“I think it’s a phenomenal help to students,” said Frey about the center—the only such facility at a public university in Ohio and one of few nationwide that focuses on academically oriented technology training, according to its director, Duane Whitmire.

StudentTech, as it’s often called, moved last fall from Jerome Library—its home from its inception in 2001—to 200 Saddlemire Student Services Building, where it will host a “grand opening” Tuesday (April 15) from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The center offers workshops for both small and large groups, such as Frey’s students. Its workshop room, for small groups, is equipped for use of VHS tapes, DVDs, video CDs and streaming video from WBGU-TV, in addition to Internet access and display. Workshop topics range from using Web browsers and search engines to avoiding junk email and computer viruses.

StudentTech also provides one-on-one tutoring on various software packages, as well as a separate Personal Technology Trainer program. In that program, a student is paired with one of the center’s student employees to “establish more of an ongoing (tutoring) relationship” for software instruction, Whitmire said.

The most popular StudentTech service is its digital video program, allowing students to check out cameras, tripods and lighting kits. With the end of spring semester nearing, all of the 40 cameras are spoken for, said Program Coordinator Kim Fleshman, noting that many of the digital videographers also come to the center to use—and get help with— iMovie editing software.

Pointing to the increased popularity of digital video on campus, including its use for classwork, Whitmire noted that the number of camera checkouts last fall semester (416) exceeded the number for the entire 2001-02 academic year (364). Some academic areas on campus now require students to digitally record themselves, including student teachers and performing music students, he added.

More than two dozen online tutorials are available to students through StudentTech as well. Some offer how-to information about becoming more kktechnologically savvy, while others guide students through a particular task or application, such as creating an online portfolio.

Fleshman said the center is “a one-stop shop” for the kinds of assistance that faculty and staff receive through the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology, and Instructional Media Services.

She and Whitmire pointed out that faculty members who have learned about digital video or another application can request similar training for their students through StudentTech.

StudentTech also administers a program in which students who are receiving financial aid can apply for free use of a laptop computer for an academic year. All of the roughly 150 iBook computers in the laptop program are currently in use, Fleshman said.