Why Every Large Business and School Needs a Tech Bar
What’s a Tech Bar you might be wondering?
A Tech Bar serves up digital literacies, skills, and competencies to employees and students. Digital Citizenship and digital skills are some of the most important skills and tools everyone needs to have in today’s world.
So how do your staff, faculty, and students gain these skills? In education we try to build these skills into the curriculum somehow. The problem with this is often the teachers/staff themselves haven’t yet acquired these skills themselves and follow premade programs that don’t really fit into their everyday lessons. This not only makes it more difficult for an educator to fit into their class, but vastly reduces the impact to students.
For staff/faculty, it’s even more difficult to pick up these skills. We don’t know what we don’t know and trying to pick up skills like these outside of the workplace can be difficult. That is where the Tech Bar concept fills the void.
At St. Norbert College(SNC), we created the Tech Bar after seeing how successful our Writing Center is for our students. The Tech Bar at St. Norbert is a physical space for people to go, but it also handles our staff, student orgs, and department trainings around technology.
After we initially started our Tech Bar, we took a trip out East to see the Digital Knowledge Center at the University of Mary Washington, and the Hive at Muhlenberg College. We learned some fantastic lessons from this trip that helped to propel the student side of our Tech Bar concept. Before taking this trip our Tech Bar was struggling a bit. Meeting the fantastic students and staff at these institutions was extremely helpful.
Side Note: We recommend you take some road trips (in a car) to see what other people are doing in your space. It’s super fun and you learn a lot about your co-workers!
Based on our newfound knowledge we created a space inside of our ITS department that was part of the existing Academic Technology space. This allows our student Consultants (student workers at the Tech Bar) to have proximity to us if they have questions while helping students, staff or faculty with appointments or walk-ins.
One important item for us at SNC was extending this service to more than just students. That has proven to be immeasurably helpful for staff and faculty. We really want our student experience to be top notch, and we felt expanding this service beyond students positively impacts their experience.
We are providing faculty with support to try new things in their classes with Domains, Virtually Reality, Video Production, and more. Beyond that, our staff are taking advantage of our trainings as well as making appointments. This impacts student experience as our staff are able to become more efficient and collaborative. In turn they can create more efficient and collaborative processes for students on campus.
Tech Bar Menu Examples
- Web Skills-Domain of One’s Own, HTML,CSS, Wordpress, Domain Management
- Video Production- Capturing, Editing, Publishing video
- Digital Mapping-Creating and Sharing digital Maps
- Productivity- Email, Calendar, Spreadsheets, Documents and more
- Social Media-Creating, Using, Participating
- Digital Citizenship-Digital Identity, Participation, Critical Thinking
At this point you might be wondering how this applies to a non-educational business? It became clear very quickly that providing these services for the business side of our college has been very impactful. Using the Tech Bar has helped departments to save money on expensive software by learning how to use the tools we already have more effectively. As stated above we have become more collaborative and efficient.
Through our Tech Bar trainings, our staff has learned more about cool things other departments are doing. This also allows our staff to take more ownership and pride in our trainings as we often feature staff and have them present. Training as SNC looks very different than at other schools and businesses because attendees want to attend. We work very hard to anticipate the needs of our staff and offer sessions they are interested in.
The topics of these trainings often mirror our services at the Tech Bar and having the physical space allows staff to come and extend their learning or get personalized help on the things we cover in our trainings. The Tech Bar allows us to offer a much higher level of customer experience to our staff and it’s something they appreciate.
While we have a focus on staff and faculty, it’s our students that benefit most. As mentioned above the writing center provides students with help on their writing. It does not write anything for them, but rather helps them improve their writing. We take that same approach at the Tech Bar. We help students gain skills they can take with them; skills that employers are looking for in today’s workforce. We even help students think about how they can show their skills through their own domains.
Our skills are linked with the Bryn Mawr Digital Competencies which are also being applied in other areas of teaching and learning across campus. We use these as a guideline for our services, offerings and conversation about how to best talk about new skills with employers.
It’s been clear over the past year and a half that the Tech Bar has enhanced the student, faculty and staff experience at St. Norbert. Not only do our customers gain skills and literacies they can use on a daily basis, we help set them up for success in whatever is next for them.
The real question is when will you start your Tech Bar?
