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

V-Labs

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V-Labbin’

I don’t have a ton of updates this week besides more VLabs work. We really are out here doing this VLabs work.

 

I found a lot of duplicate interactives in between the labs and noted which ones, so I hope that helps save the team time not having to make graphics we’ve already made. It’ll help the course look more cohesive too.

 

It says they’re checked off but they’re not truly done! Mwahahaha

 

 

Other than that I have been working at reviewing others’ PSDs and assembling them in Canvasser. It’s good practice in following a style guide and otherwise looking for precedents. Cohesion and teamwork >> what each person personally thinks it should be at this point. I’ve also learned to animate Canvassers!

 

 

 

 

Vocabulary Flash Cards

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Vocabulary Flash Cards 

This is another basic training on making a slideshow in WordPress and editing bold graphics in Photoshop. Big thank you to Valerie for helping me figure out where to start with this. The instructions need to be updated on how to insert a slideshow but I’m sure it will be an easy fix I can add on. I Google translated my words to Nepali so sorry if you can understand the language and the translation is a little rough. The assignments provided a resource to look up ready made graphics and then to pair it with a language that doesn’t use the Roman alphabet.

triple duplicate

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Triple Duplicate

Today I finalized making three different interactives uniform to each other and within style guides as best as I could get them. Two of them were Maddy’s and one of them was mine. I tweaked Maddy’s PSDs to be similar to mine after discussing with Valerie what the formatting alterations should be. Mine required a bit of touching up as well. The reason my first photo doesn’t have a legend box is because those are interactive with clickable shapes underneath it. Mine also has a popup window for text at the bottom while the other one does not below it. That is because mine goes back and forth between the clickable while the second one show a final answer text popup that doesn’t require going back on. I made sure all the dots matched within the style guide and that the clickables, popups, and drag elements were made teal. On the Grave site they are missing their additional data recourses. That’s all for right now!



blog update (:

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Nothing really special has happened over the past week. Just the usual vlabs psd/png assignments. Valerie trained me how to review other STA’s vlabs work, so I started on that yesterday! Few screenshots of the ones I’ve been editing/ reviewing/ making from scratch:

And here’s my 8bit gif!!

Updates!

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Not much has changed since the last meeting. We’ve been working on V-labs and trying to get things done as soon as we can. I’ve been working on reviewing PSD files and assigning more PSD files to other co-workers to review.

V-labs is chugging along just fine I think!

Luna has been doing well! She really likes climbing my shoulders.

Side Hustle

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SIDE HUSTLE

Valerie, Chloe, and Maddy talk about their pets in the office a lot (which is a good thing because the stories are cute), so I decided to show some of my not pets. On the weekends I usually dog sit for people through the Rover app (not sponsored). The first dog is Dunya who was only two months old and the softest puppy breath little baby! She was very sweet and playful. The other dog was Grizzly who is 9 years old but the size of Dunya. He was very attached to his owner and just wanted to sleep and go for short walks. I loved his calm energy but I wish he could’ve been more happy around me. I have another dog sitting to do this weekend for a poodle mix. Fingers crossed that that goes over well!