November 2004 — Applications
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SJSU Gets Creative With Laptop Initiative
Adobe provided faculty development classes in the use of its products. Faculty also offered workshops for their peers in the use of the Adobe products and made suggestions for the use of the products by students during class. So far, more than 1,600 hours of faculty and staff professional development have been logged by the project. When students arrived in fall 2003 with laptops, the faculty were ready with lesson plans designed to make effective use of their students’ wireless laptop technology.
Providing Anytime, Anywhere Learning
Students in the art and design classes and in the journalism and mass communications classes are gaining valuable, real-world design and production skills using the tools standard to their professions. While working with images is a natural for the design students, the art history and fine art programs have also been engaged, as have the animation, photography and digital media classes. For art and design students and for the journalism and mass communications students, the Adobe products were an absolute necessity since the tools are recognized as the industry standard in these professional fields.
For Dennis Dunleavy, the assistant professor and photojournalism coordinator at SJSU, giving students an edge is critical to developing the next generation of journalists in a digital age. “Students in the photojournalism sequence must acquire digital-image editing skills on the software that is being used in the industry today,” he says. “Making software applications such as Photoshop, InDesign and GoLive available to our students gives them a jump start into a technologically driven field.”
The laptop and wireless environments have enabled anytime, anywhere learning. This has allowed faculty to provide just-in-time suggestions for improvement of student work within the classroom, within faculty offices, as well as via electronic communications tools such as e-mail, weblogs or any other electronic collaboration tools. In addition, students are no longer limited to meet at specific places and times to work on class projects or restricted to scheduled time in campus computer labs to complete assignments.
The School of Art and Design and the School of Journalism and Mass Communications adopted InDesign for their media classes. A big factor in this decision was Adobe’s commitment to providing special educational pricing, which made InDesign a more affordable alternative for students to purchase.
Real-World Preparation
One of the primary qualities that the faculty considered when adopting the Adobe software was the fact that its products are tightly integrated. This means that a student who masters the palettes in one Adobe product can easily use another product in the suite with confidence. For example, being able to double-click within InDesign and intuitively know how to make changes to a graphic using Photoshop has proved very helpful in the production of quality page layouts.
Along with becoming more skilled in the use of industry-standard software, students participating in the Wireless Laptop Pilot Project enjoy the added advantage of having an electronic portfolio within the laptop, which allows resources and skills learned in one class to be easily and readily applied in another. Having a portfolio also helps students as they enter the workforce. For instance, when students interview for a position in their desired profession after graduation, demonstrating the skills needed for the job can be done by showing the work created within the university’s programs, which is stored on their personal laptops.
- Mary Fran Breiling, SJSU
For information on the Wireless Laptop Pilot Project, visit www.sjsu.edu/wireless.
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