STA Blog

STA Work Blog

STAs: Student Technology Assistants

Who We Are
LAITS: IT and Facilities Director, Joe TenBarge initiated the Student Technology Assistant program in 2004. STAs are UT students who work on a variety of projects in collaboration with UT faculty and LAITS staff members. STAs assist College of Liberal Arts faculty members and administrative staff with print and web design. From building presentations, to creating audio/visual works, and producing online classes in the LAITS film studios, STAs are instrumental in helping COLA faculty realize their vision for multimedia projects that enhance their teaching and the students learning experience. By the end of their student careers, STAs have portfolios which demonstrate their accrued technical and design skills.

Prospective STAs:

Creative and technically inclined students are appointed as STAs for one year, with the possibility of being rehired as long as they study at the university. Applicants for the program are hired before both long semesters. Interested students may look for postings on Hire-A-Longhorn when positions are available. Positions will have Student Technology Assistant (illustrator or web designer) in the title of the job post.

Faculty and Staff:

Faculty & Staff with questions about services, please contact us.

https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/laits/contacts.php

  • Audio Services: Michael C Heidenreich, Director of Studio Operations & STA Program Coordinator
  • Video Services: Kelly Webster, Video Production Supervisor, Video STA Supervisor
  • Graphic Design & Web Design Services: Suloni Robertson, Art Director / Design & Coding STA Supervisor

Starting out!

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Starting out

Hello world! I’m Maddy, and I’m in my fourth year of studying advertising. A little about me, I’m from DFW, I think all cats are queens, and I like to DJ for fun. I also have a good amount of experience in design (not to brag but I was commissioned for my first logo design in 6th grade… yes it was for my dad), which is what drew me to LAITS and being a design + coding STA in the first place.

 

This is about to be my third full week as an STA and I’m really enjoying it. Everyone has been so helpful and kind throughout my whole onboarding process and the work is enjoyable too.

 

The major project this summer is creating all 12 units of Vlabs interactives for the physical anthropology course. While I’m sure it’ll start getting tedious coloring in monkey bones all day, it’s been nice finding a good workflow and getting comfy with the Vlabs style guide.

 

Here’s a screenshot of one interactive:

 

 

 

This was another I made, which ended up being a couple hundred layers after creating the graph and all the interactive elements. It’s definitely like a puzzle remaking an interactive. I recreate each piece of the original, while thinking of small ways to improve its layout, as well as staying thoughtful of how the next person will have to animate it in Canvasser.

 

 

So far so good at LAITS! I’ll check in again soon.

 

Project: Virtual Labs
Client /Prof: UT Anthropology
Completion status: Started spring 2019
Staff guidance: Suloni Robertson
STA team members: Jaclyn Alford, Valerie Tran, Emily Park, Bridget, Chloe Kim, Olivia Wilczek, Abriella Corker
Description/plans: Move + update the Virtual Laboratory for Physical Anthropology from Flash to HTML
To be completed: End of summer 2019

STA Orientation

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Dear Abriella!
During the later part of your STA Orientation Tuesday July 9, 2019,
you’ll design and upload your STA Blog banner to the STA blog.

FIRST STEP
Photoshop
Design and make your banner

a. Use the photoshop specs for your blog banner that i placed in your STA volume folder

b. Save your unmerged files back to your STA volume folder

SECOND STEP
WP
Log-in

Publishing Help Documentation/Instructions
Read this WP sites “Publishing Help” before you upload your banner.
STA publishing help:
* the publishing help is out of date, please take a moment and make suggestions for reformatting & re-writing the instructions, on a comment in bascamp
Blog post
Reflect on the day. You blog posts will be a written experience with images, of your time as an STA with LAITS.
Write a bit about your about your-self, & what you did during orientation & upload your banner.

ABOUT IMAGES
Do not merely copy paste images in to your blog. Always upload images into the “Media” section of blog first, and then set the image from the media folder to display on your blog.
Don’t use the thumbnail version of your images.
Use images that are 72 dpi
Screen shots are fine
Images that are 780 pix wide format nicely above or below text blocks

ABOUT CATEGORIES
Check the “2018 Fall – 2019 Spring” Category box for all the blog posts you make this semester and next semester so that all of your work is documented in the correct semesters.

Zoom Category.jpg
Category.jpg 72.9 KB View full-size Download
LASTLY
Comment on Basecamp
Notification comments: etiquette, files, questions, feedback
Let Chloe and Valerie know you’ve completed this task.
Do this by uploading a link from your blog, to a comment on basecamp, and for your basecamp comments in general:
  • *Always address the person(s) you are writing to by their names.
  • *Always use complete sentences.
  • *Always add links or paths to your design file residing in your STA folder
  • *and a courtesy to your collaborators and mentors, add a screen shot to your comment, of the file you are asking for feedback on.
For this activity, use “@” Valerie and “@”Chloe on your bascamp comment, to let them know any questions you may have about the mechanics of using the STA blog, about the mechanics of photoshop, and to let them know that you have completed this task and that you would like a little feedback on on your banner design 🙂

Thank you & have fun!

Hi Maddy! :-) ready to blog??

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Dear Maddy 🙂 i*** finally*** have your blog space ready.

Before you start work on VLabs, please upload the STA banner that you designed for your STA Blog here & and write for us a brief note of your experience as an STA so far.

WP

Log-in

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/wp-admin

Read Publishing Help Documentation/Instructions 

Read our “Publishing Help” before you upload your banner. Click on each of these links and read the STA publishing help. The help is out of date! i would appreciate your feedback on updating the instructions. Please let me know when you are ready to talk to me about it.

 

ABOUT IMAGES

Do not merely copy paste images in to your blog. Always upload images into the “Media” section of blog first, and then set the image from the media folder to display on your blog.

Don’t use the thumbnail version of your images.

Use images that are 72 dpi

screen shots are fine

images that are 780 pix wide format nicely above or below text blocks

ABOUT CATEGORIES

Check the “2018 Fall – 2019 Spring” Category box for all the blog posts you make this summer so that all of your work is documented in the correct semesters.

LASTLY Comment on Basecamp

Let us know you’ve completed this task, on basecamp.

Upload a link to this blog, on your base camp to-do:

https://3.basecamp.com/4001554/buckets/7892081/todos/1547763221

 

Thank you Maddy:-)

VLabs update and such

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Vlabs:

Compiled all of our VLabs asset creation instructions into one document right in basecamp:

 

Updated the psd template to provide more instructions and assets:

Additionally, we have been going through the current canvasser creation assignments and removing those that can just be included as flat html! This will be really helpful in taking a bit of work off our plates!

Reformating content – Online French 317C course

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I was placed on a project with my co-worker, Chloe, that required the two of us to work together to reformat the content of the online French 317C course for Professor Kyle’s Carnegie Mellon presentation. We were tasked to go into the CSS/HTML to change the way the specific CLIO pages looked and how it was organized. This included making the text wrap around art and photos, going into the HTML to organize the grammar/word rows and columns, making full color headers for page headings, and using header style text for the card or page headings.

We were first told to go into the course and scroll down to:

“Sujet 3.1.A Les origines de Montréal à Initiation à l’histoire de Montréal à the texts are on Clio pages entitled Les origines de Montréal and De Français à Canadiens.”

and

“Sujet 3.1.A Les origines de Montréal à Exploration culturelle à Voix des ancêtres à Les historiens nous parlent à the texts are on Clio pages entitled Lecture: Colonisation and Lecture: Grande Paix et grande guerre.”

 

Chloe and I split up the work to better streamline the process. Chloe took on the “Sujet 3.1.A Les origines de Montréal à Initiation à l’histoire de Montréal à the texts are on Clio pages entitled Les origines de Montréal and De Français à Canadiens.” section and I took on the “Sujet 3.1.A Les origines de Montréal à Exploration culturelle à Voix des ancêtres à Les historiens nous parlent à the texts are on Clio pages entitled Lecture: Colonisation and Lecture: Grande Paix et grande guerre“.

Below are screenshots of Chloe’s edits:

Chloe’s edits in her section included:

  • Middle aligning the images & integrating the slide show photo tab
  • Adding a header for both “En Contexte” and added a brand new tab called “Quiz” at the very end.
  • Indented the options (a) and (b) in the section “En contexte” for better readability

 

Below are screenshots of my edits:

 

There was feedback given to us by Heather which included adding a caption to an image that didn’t have one, editing and omitting some headers, and, added in more slideshows.

Below are screenshots of the final edits!

 

Here are some screenshots of the banner and header edits!

 

Last day

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Today, I worked on retrieving a component as a promise, in order to populate the component after the json file has loaded. Definitely the way you learn by practicing is the best objective of the program.

Today is also my last day, I am so thankful for this opportunity. I have gotten something invaluable as knowledge, thanks to my mentors who were always there to resolve my doubts, as the STA members who let me think out of the box and let me learned from other fields. I had the chance to get involved on real projects with real clients and launched some websites as: 15 minutes history podcasts, theatre of philosophy, and Kiowa timeline. It has been an amazing semester, thank you all.

This journey has end, and I will go back to Mexico to finish my undergraduate studies on Computer Science, you all are cordially invited.