A Day in the Life of Tribal Technolgy
Reenie Vlitos-Rowe
Web & Communications Editor
Tulalip Technology Leap
How many of us have had the opportunity to "skip school" for a few hours each day, and still learn about far away places like Kiribati, become a Student Consultant with her own business cards, design a personalized Web page, or…. just hang out with people from all over the world who enjoy what they are doing, and want you to enjoy it too?
Well…this is what Teah Reeves, a Marysville Junior High School student and Tribal member, did with Tulalip Technology Leap (TTL) in June after school administrators asked TTL to arrange a program for Teah to demonstrate some "real world" applications of subjects she is studying in school.
Although her internship, or job shadowing, only scratched the surface of TTL’s 23 ongoing projects, she created language documents that contained both English and the Lushootseed names for animals, developed computer maps of faraway Pacific islands as she tracked Amelia Earhart’s fateful flight, answered Call Center queries, and saw how to troubleshoot computer hardware problems.
Teah is the first of many young Tulalip tribal members who will be able to benefit directly from TTL’s ongoing projects on the Reservation. So let’s see how the TTL team helped to make this new tribal world of technology come alive for a thirteen year old.
As the mentoring program shows (see inset below), a number of TTL’s technology groups developed personalized daily activities for Teah, and dedicated several hours each day to explaining the relevance of a technology application to a particular task or job.
When it was all over and Teah was walking out the door, she smiled and said, "This was fun. I want to come back." It was fun for us too, and we look forward to seeing Teah again, as well as many other students!
For more information on TTL’s mentoring program, please contact Valerie Edmunds at (360) 651-4091 or valerie@tulaliptechleap.com.
Teah’s Mentoring Program
On Monday, June 3 Brian Williams covered it all, from tower cases, hard drives, CD drives and floppy disk drives to USB versus IEEE parallel cables for printing, mice, trackballs, processor speeds, and lasers. He showed how tribal end-users are utilizing their computers for video editing, composing and creating digital music.
As Brian explained to Teah, "some of the satisfaction that I get from doing what I do comes in part from solving problems, and helping the end-user be productive. Some of the behind-the-scenes disciplines, such as networking and equipment troubleshooting, may not be as "front-page" as being a Webmaster or working with Geographical Information Systems (GIS), but interesting work can be found in any of the team groups. It’s the sum total of the parts that makes a team work as a whole".
Valerie Edmunds and Robin Kennedy asked Teah about her particular interests and whether there were any school related projects that they could help her work on while she was with TTL. Teah mentioned that she was interested in creating business cards, designing a web site, learning about GIS, and working with the Lushootseed font. She also wanted to display some of her own art on the web site.
On Tuesday, June 4 Valerie helped Teah scan in her dream catcher for the web site and prepared her "Student Consultant" business cards.
On Wednesday, June 5 Teah selected several clip art pictures for her web site and Valerie taught her how to download them and convert them to JPEG files.
Kevin Jones showed Teah some web design and development basics. They reviewed a number of web sites, he demonstrated the use of HTML in Dreamweaver, and they set up the basic navigation for her web page.
On Thursday, June 6 Laini McDaniel showed Teah how to create language documents in Microsoft Word that contain both English and Lushootseed names for animals. They inserted animal clip art into each document, and Teah successfully completed all of the required steps to complete the project.
On Monday, June 10 Robin introduced Teah to the Tribal Call Center where she was shown the importance of courtesy and customer service in dealing with computer related queries on the telephone.
On Tuesday, June 11 Adam Urbaniak took Teah on a flight with Amelia Earhart. Apart from working on a flight path and possible crash site evaluations, this exciting GIS assignment was a lesson in American aviation history and an introduction to distant countries, oceans and cities.
On Wednesday, June 12 Adam continued Teah’s GIS geography lesson with an Africa Atlas project and she completed maps on major cities, countries, rivers, wildlife, and topography.
On Monday, June 17 Kevin and Teah continued to work on her web site, while learning about navigation and simple web design. This day’s work resulted in three new pages and a different look.
On Tuesday, June 18 Kevin and Teah worked on a personal information page and created a pop-up birthday wish list.
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