Buckeye Trail students creating print and online materials, websites


OLD WASHINGTON – A newly renovated business lab with a Xerox Versant 280 press offers students at Buckeye Trail High School new opportunities to learn and succeed.

Students learn practical skills that will benefit them in the workplace by using Microsoft Office, Adobe, and GenYES to design and create a variety of products.

Items created by students include sports programs, personalized products such as neighborhood signs and banners, advertising, and job bills, to name a few.

“This year we’ve taken a step forward with the lab and the one-year courses,” said Jerrod Norman, second-year business and computer science teacher at the school. “It gave students opportunities they didn’t have last year.

“When these students apply for jobs, company staff will see that they have the training and knowledge, as well as the skills, to excel and be successful.”

Classes only lasted one semester last year, but the change this school year gives current and future students more time to learn.

Last year, students were able to create things like sports programs, but had to send them to an outside publisher to get them printed.

This work is now done internally with the addition of Versant Press funded by several sources including Career Tech funds, SR 2 funds via the Perkins grant generated by the CARES Act, and the District General Fund.

Norman said most large projects are organized and completed under the direction of a student editor, which gives them even more hands-on experience.

One example is the 80-page fall sports program produced under the direction of student editor McKenzie Todd using Fiery Command WorkStation to format the product.

“The program was put together and edited in less than two weeks of class,” Norman said.

The new press also allows the class to create personalized programs with special inserts or covers.

Other examples of in-house print jobs include the Buckeye Trail FFA creating a 1 by 12 foot banner for the Guernsey County Fair, wristbands that serve as return tickets, signs for the activity complex parking lot Baker and magnets.

Students at Buckeye Trail High School created a variety of products in-house with the addition of a Xerox Versant 280 press.  Some examples include the 80-page full-color fall sports program, wristbands serving as return tickets, magnets, and a personalized teacher scoring book.

“Students learn professional skills and we print things basically at cost,” Norman said. “It helps boosters provide more opportunities for other kids by diverting expenses instead of sending them to print at a higher cost.”

And learning doesn’t stop with printed products.

Adobe students learn video recording and editing with Adobe Premier programs, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver.

“They are excited,” Norman said. “It’s great for creating ads with special effects and other projects.”

Students use the program to create advertisements for school events and Norman believes the work could extend to commercial advertisements outside of school.

The Dreamweaver program is used to create websites.

“Last year they created a website with one or two pages,” Norman said. “This year they’re working on multi-page websites with links to other pages.”

GenYES offers schools like Buckeye Trail the opportunity to harness the energy and expertise of students to become the IT experts in their schools and communities.

Students provide technical support for their classrooms, help set up distance learning, solve problems, create websites for schools and clubs, and more.

“Students who complete the program become certified technical assistants,” Norman added.

The district plans to add more business-related classes in the future.

“The programs provide additional opportunities for students who are not attending vocational technology schools or college,” Norman said. “I want them to be able to learn here without going anywhere else. We want to keep our students here at Buckeye Trail.”

The programs have been popular with students, according to Norman.

“We are fortunate to have very talented students who are hungry for knowledge and content,” he said.

Middle school students work with Google Apps on a nine-week rotation.

“It’s a start for us and we’re looking to add some things when we get good at these areas,” said Zac Housely, director of programs and education for the local East Guernsey school district.

The renovations that allowed for greater spacing in the business lab and Senso, a cloud-based network for classroom protection and asset management, helped make it safer for students in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Senso program allows Norman to monitor all the computers used in the classroom from his desk and gives him the ability to capture screens to share with other students.

Renovations still underway for the lab include installing a large monitor on a wall in the lab that Norman can use to display student work.

“They will be able to see things without gathering around a single computer,” he said. “They can stay at a social distance, which is really good with the COVID pandemic. “

The spacing between the lab’s 26 computer stations also helps keep students away from each other, and the technology the district has acquired allows it to share the classroom with students quarantined due to the pandemic.

Norman said he hopes to enroll some of the district’s students in the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival and the 48 Hour Film Project.

The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival is an annual video competition in which young filmmakers create bizarre short films that tell the full stories of Newbery’s award-winning books in around 90 seconds.

Meanwhile, the 48 Hour Film Project is an annual film competition in which teams of filmmakers are assigned a genre, character, prop, and line of dialogue, and have 48 hours to create a short film that contains those elements. .

“These competitions give students the opportunity to network with authors and learn multimedia procedures,” Norman said. “We wouldn’t have this without the additional opportunities available to our students.”

Students can be certified in various programs at the end of the school year.