Curious how other faculty have integrated mentors? The following courses have incorporated mentors:

Chemistry 101 (Chen & Gomez)
The technology mentor assisted 100+ students with independent group project work designed to supplement course lecture material. This role involved support of a range of technology applications, PowerPoint and laboratory chemical and library research experiences for the students.

“The technology mentor helps students review and apply class material in a specific problem. The positive outcomes include: increasing student confidence in tackling problems, strengthening their creativity, and making chemistry more attractive. All of these were possible in a large class because thanks to the technology mentor they were able to get individual attention at key points in their tackling of their group project.”(Prof. Gomez)

English 202 (Ackmann)

French 331 (Vaget)
"This course was a true experiement. I did not exactly know where I was going when we started, but I trusted my team, and after Thankgiving everything made sense for everybody....There is less anxiety since the students deal with one of their peers, and trust her to help them through....I was able to introduce a new way to look at a text, and would like to explore further this new angle of literary analysis."(Prof. Vaget)


Geology 101 (Werner)
The technology mentor assisted students in carrying out assignments and creating graphs using Excel and helped set up computer labs using specialized software to study environmental processes. She held regular weekly office hours for student consultations and played an important role in introducing the use of WebCT for this class. She also briefly explored GIS with the possibility of future incorporation.

German 100 (Davis)

Indpt 102 (Dobosh)
The technology mentor assisted with student use of Simulink and Matlab software and also with development of web resources for student use. As this was a first-time offering, the technology mentor also contributed to course development, identifying a large number of resources to assist student learning.

Indpt 117 (Boisselle & Ewing)
The technology mentor’s role in this fast-paced J-term course included offering support in student use of Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and PowerPoint for final projects. This was done via regular office hours and one-on-one consultation and email support as needed. The mentor also assisted with a Photoshop workshop. The technology mentor role was critical for successfully supporting a technology-heavy final project with a class composed mostly of first-year students.

Italian 101 (Troncelliti)
"The technology mentor is knowledgeable and quick to learn. She was very helpful with students."(Prof. Troncelliti)

Math 251 (Morrow)
The technology mentor in this course provided weekly support of LaTeX software. She taught several sessions to the students in the use of this mark-up language, held office hours to assist students with use of the tool in their assignments and made herself available for additional hours as needed. The technology mentor also assisted students in understanding mathematical software and offered assistance for studentl presentations.

“I believe that the tech mentor positions teach us more about education, peer-to-peer relationships, and faculty student relations…communicating with other tech mentors gave me an idea of what technology classes use. This was very interesting to me, since I am a CS major and I wanted to know how non-CS majors interact with technology.” (Mentor Kazandjieva)

Music 371 (Cuthbert)
Summary here.
"The students were willing to the take more risks in including musical examples (more of them and up to the last minute) knowing that they could call the tech mentor to help them if they got stuck." (Prof. Cuthbert)

Physics 301 & 303 (Hudgings)
Physics 303: The technology mentor in this course taught ‘4th hour’ weekly Mathematica software sessions. As part of this role, the technology mentor created handouts for each week to complement classroom instruction and taught the class Mathematica techniques to augment other computational approaches used in the course. The students enrolled in the course report high satisfaction – they asked for the mentor to follow them to another Physics course in the Spring!

Physics 301: The technology mentor aided the professor in re-developing this course using Matlab, a very robust programming language and simulation environment, for calcuations rather than Mathematica, a less specialized software. The technology mentor facilitated the introduction of Matlab by providing weekly '4th-hour' instruction and developing a series of worksheets to assist students in becoming adept with the programming environment. Professor Hudgings has commented that Matlab is an excellent tool for this course and that these worksheets have continuing value for the next offering of the course and possibly other Physics courses that choose to use Matlab.

"The technology mentor has gotten the entire class up and running with Matlab. The class can now program Matlab on their own, and we routinely use it to visualize problems in new ways. Hooray!" (Prof. Hudgings)

Psych 200 (Binder)
The primary goal for the technology mentor role in this course was to help students use an array of technologies to more easily develop and then execute empirical studies within the context of a small team of students. The technology mentor introduced the students to Refworks (online citation manager) for their literature reviews, Formsite (an online survey tool) for administering their experiments, and PowerPoint for presenting their results. The technology mentor reached out to students in a variety of ways, including the development of software tip sheets, customized workshops, office hours and one-on-one consultation. She also maintained a WebCT presence. The faculty member reports that introduction of the online survey tool in this methods course has now had some ‘trickle effect’ on upper-level courses in the department.

” The Technology Mentor Program let many students use technology in a way they wouldn't have if we didn't have the mentor. For us, it wasn't so much the content of the course but rather introducing them to tools, or methods for doing research that was helpful. In addition, I think it is something that many of them may use either in future courses, or in future research.” (Lab Director Blouin)

Religion 230 (Grayson)
The technology mentor role in this course focused on the support of an end-of-semester capstone project. For the first time, a ‘multimedia narrative’ option was offered to students as an alternative to a final written assignment. This also represented the first time that LITS officially supported a multimedia narrative assignment. The technology skills required for successful completion of the multimedia narrative assignment included digital video and audio editing, iMovie, and iDVD. Six students elected to create multimedia narratives for their final projects and in general, participants were pleased with the outcomes.

I believe that offering this type of project has changed how the students experience and grapple with the content of the course. I hope in future offerings of this course more students will be enticed to volunteer to meet the challenge of using multimedia as the intellectual medium for presenting their ideas.” (Prof. Grayson)

Theatre 285 (Babb)
In this course, students were exposed to concepts and skills related to sound and video editing which they incorporated into their weekly assignments. One of the primary goals of introducing these tools to the students, according to the faculty member, was to “give the students access to themselves.” In addition to providing one-on-one consultative support on related technologies, the technology mentor offered four workshops tailored to curricular goals: sound editing, still image editing, PowerPoint, and video/moving pictures editing. The faculty member was pleased with the outcomes.

“The level of skill learned with the mentor was of a higher order than I could provide [alone].” (Prof. Babb)