EGARC Facilities

The EGARC conference room (4038 Wescoe) is specially designed for class meetings, presentations and conferences for thirteen or fewer people. The room is equipped with an LCD projector and a multi-standard VCR/DVD player capable of playing videos from anywhere in the world. A computer with an ethernet connection is also available for those wishing to do multimedia presentations.

The room is also equipped with a video conferencing system. This system can be used to have a guest lecturer speak to your class (while remaining at his/her home institution), to facilitiate discussions with students from another school about course readings or world events, to conduct interviews with off-campus job candidates or to allow members of MA/PhD exam or dissertation committees to participate from off-campus. Use of the video conferencing system requires consultation with a member of EGARC's staff to determine the validity and efficacy of the planned use.

The Frank Bangs Memorial Computer Classroom (4066 Wescoe) is a dedicated teaching classroom assigned to instructors for the entire semester. The room is laid out in four rows of six student stations, perpendicular to the front of the classroom with an instructor station at the top of the middle row. Running along the front wall is a white board and in the front right corner is an audio/video cabinet. This cabinet contains a multistandard VCR, a multistandard DVD player, and an audio cassette deck. The instructor station is also equipped with a visual presenter for printed material, slides and film negatives and a hookup for a laptop. All video signals, including those from the VCR, the DVD player, the visual presenter, and the instructor's computer can be projected onto a screen at the front of the room by means of a ceiling mounted LCD projector. All audio signals are run through the amplifier to a pair of speakers mounted on the front wall.The classroom offers instructors and students the latest in multimedia technology and is specially designed to function as a classroom rather than a computer laboratory. The small footprint of the flat panel monitors allows students a full- sized desktop for written assignments, and makes it possible for students to see each other clearly, even across the room. The wheeled chairs and open spaces between rows also makes group work far easier than in a typical classroom.

Who was Frank Bangs, and why is this classroom named after him? | What kinds of courses are taught in Bangs?

The Digital Language Classroom (4068 Wescoe)is divided into two parts, a computer lab and a video-viewing area. The computer lab is open to drop-in traffic unless a class has the roomreserved. The computer lab consists of 24 student carrels and an instructor console, which includes a multi-standard VCR/DVD player capable of playing videos from anywhere in the world, a visual presenter and a networked computer which can be used for playing digital audio and video. The lab features the Sony Soloist and Sony Virtuoso programs, a fully-digital VOIP system that allow the instructor to monitor and speak to individual students, pair two or more students together (and monitor and speak to the groups), speak to all students at one time, create two different groups using different media sources, and record their student's voices. Instructors can even lock the student decks and control all of the stations from the console. This setup is optimal for administering listening and speaking tests to large groups. Instructors who want to use the Digital Language Classroom for their classes must make reservations well in advance of their intended date and must attend an orientation session. This session will include not only the basic technical details of running the system, but also some suggestions on posssible activities. The video-viewing area consists of four stations for watching VHS tapes and two additional stations that can be used to view either VHS or DVD videos. Headphones are attached to each viewing station and do not need to be checked out. Audio splitters can be checked out from 4070 Wescoe if more than two people would like to watch the same video simultaneously. Patrons can also check out the remote controls for any equipment if necessary for accessing subtitles/closed captioning or other DVD menu options. All of the computers in the room will also play DVDs. This area is open for use even when the computer lab is being used for a class. Special arrangements must be made in order to close this room to drop-in traffic.

Main Reception (4070 Wescoe) is our "front door" where patrons come to check out audio and video materials, pay fines and buy print cards. Keep in mind that we supply materials for a large number of departments and instructors, and are thus unable to keep track of homework assignments for individual courses. Students should know the name of the textbook they are using and the specific assignment they need. There is a drop box to the right of the door to 4070 Wescoe to return materials. You may use this while the Center is open or after hours to return audio and video cassettes.

The EGARC sound booth (4070B Wescoe) is a soundproofed mini-studio designed to create audio supplements for class use. Audio files can be created in either analog (cassette tape) or digital format. Digital files can be edited for content and saved in a variety of formats, including .wav and .mp3. These files can be burned onto CDs, sent by e-mail or uploaded to BlackBoard or the web for student use. The sound booth is the perfect place to record dialogs for language tests, conduct oral interviews or make language supplements for in-class or web-based instruction.

The Faculty Multimedia Station (4070 Wescoe) provides faculty access to a wide variety of technology for multimedia creation. The five position station includes flat-bed and slide scanners, as well as access to Adobe Photoshop for the digital manipulation of images. It includes a form-feed scanner that can process 30 double-sided pages per minute and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, which allows you to create editable text from any scanned document. Faculty can digitize audio from reel-to-reel, record and cassette and can digitize video from laserdisc, VHS and DVD. All of these digitized files can be edited and burned to CD or DVD, put into BlackBoard, or put on the web for download or in streaming format.

The EGARC Computer Lab (4074 Wescoe) consists of 25 Gateway Profile 5.5 computers and 2 G5 iMacs. The advanced multimedia capabilities of all of these computers allow students to use the lab for listening to foreign language textbook audio supplements from our new digital audio library, watching DVDs, and recording their voices digitally for class assignments. Headphones with built-in microphones are attached to each computer. At the front of the room is an instructor station with its own Gateway Profile and a visual presenter, which are connected to an overhead LCD projector for displaying the instructor's screen to the class.

Although this room is primarily a open computer lab, it can be reserved for individual class sessions in which students will be working on computer-based projects. In those cases where students are doing presentations (and only the instructor computer is in use), we ask that you check out media equipment so that we can maximize usage of the room.