Need your students to learn a new technology? ITaP’s Student Software Trainers can help

When students enter Daye Phillippo’s freshman English class, they probably expect to learn the basics of rhetoric and composition, not how to edit videos or create eye-catching graphics.

Phillippo, a visiting clinical instructor in the College of Liberal Arts, says adding technology to her course helps keep students engaged. Using ITaP’s Student Software Trainers, she says, makes adding technology easy.

“It’s easy to assume that today’s college students are already familiar with the technology they need in class,” says Phillippo, “but that’s not true for everyone, and working with the Student Software Trainers helps create that opportunity to easily learn a new skill that would have been much harder for them to learn on their own.”

Student Software Trainers are undergraduate students employed by ITaP to teach a variety of software applications to students, faculty and staff. Trainers offer open workshops, one-on-one consultations and classroom visits to provide training and guidance for applications like visual design software Adobe InDesign, numerical computing software MATLAB and Python, a coding program.

Instructors interested in working with software trainers in the classroom can start the process by filling an online request form. The trainers and instructors then meet to discuss what would work best for a particular project or class.

“They’re very professional, they connect well with the students and they’re able to work with students one-on-one to answer any questions that they have,” says Phillippo. “I think my students find it less intimidating to learn a new technology because they’re learning it from a fellow student.”

Besides providing in-class clinics, Student Software Trainers also regularly host open workshops to teach a specific software. These events are open to faculty, staff and students and are listed on ITaP’s training calendar. Over the past year, Student Software Trainers have also created a series of videos designed to walk users through the basics of software, including Excel and Camtasia, and educational tools like Video Express, Replay and Gradescope.

“The student software trainers are a great resource,” says Phillippo. “Having the Software Trainers teach InDesign and Camtasia allows them to do what they do best, which is teach technology, and allows me to do what I do best, which is teach English.”

Writer: Dave Stephens, technology writer, Information Technology at Purdue, 765-496-7998, steph103@purdue.edu.

Last updated: November 02, 2018