On Monday, March 25, Hays High School communications, journalism and technology students took a trip to Fort Hays State University’s Department of Informatics open house.

Students attending included those from teacher Jake Dechant’s Audio/Visual Production classes, those from teacher Jessica Augustine’s news, Webpage Design and yearbook classes and those from teacher Silas Hibbs’s technology class.

The Department of Informatics, including Tiger Media Network, sponsored a number of sessions for students. Sessions ranged from creating sports hype videos, developing podcasts, editing audio and video, improving interviews, learning to use routers and more.

The group also attended a keynote speaker session between the first two breakout sessions. In the keynote session, Michael Schwanke, an Eyewitness news anchor and FactFinder 12 investigator at KWCH in Wichita spoke about growing up in Colby, attending college at FHSU and working for KWCH.

“I liked all the different sessions,” said junior Audio/Visual student Callie Burns. “My favorite part was the AI Generator and learning how that sort of thing works.”