If students or teachers fear an inability to support technology used in classrooms this can become a major hindrance to adoption of technology in teaching and learning. Tech-savvy students, however, can help alleviate these fears.
This is the first of a series of posts about my school’s Student Technology Group, also known as StuTech. The idea for the group came from a meeting in March of 2006 during the ISACS accreditation process with the hope of taking advantage of student resources we had available. StuTech currently provides support for over 300 student laptops on campus (students may bring any computer they choose and no staff support is provided) and works closely with teachers to support their use of curricular technology and tech-intensive projects.
There are a number of ways that StuTech provides support for students but its primary responsibility is the student helpdesk, the StuTech room. This was an underutilized but central space in the school that has been turned into stutech’s ‘home’. It is located across from the flat panel that shows student pictures and adjacent to student publications (for whom we installed a blue screen). We keep a collection of PCs and Macs around so our members can both get work done and help others.
The real magic begins when the nine or so ’stutechies’ begin spending their free periods in the StuTech room making themselves available to help others. We usually get one or two student requests per period (45 minutes) and more during lunch periods. We see problems ranging from trouble connecting to the school’s wireless network or VPN to questions about iMovie.
Watching students help their peers is inspiring; it is collaborative learning at its best. The stutechie might not know the answer to the student’s question, but working together it is rare that a solution can’t be found or a future course of action plotted. Each question turns into a learning experience for both the student in need of help and the stutechie.
There is often more than one stutechie at a time in the room providing an additional collaborative learning opportunity. United in our common interest in computers, we often share interesting facts or techniques and tech news with each other. Each week we place questions on the board in the room for the rest of the group to research and attempt to answer (e.g. “How do you troubleshoot DHCP related errors?” or “Why are bugs in device drivers so dangerous?”). These questions often lead to discussions from which students routinely gain new insight and understanding into aspects of technology.
Beyond the obvious education in technology, the stutechies also have a wonderful opportunity to practice communication skills. The stutechies must learn how to work with each other to solve problems, they must learn how to explain solutions to students in an easy to understand way and how to calm panicked students. During rush periods StuTech may have twice as many people with problems as people to help them, so we must practice managing the load so that all can be helped.
Stutech uses a copy of RT to track student issues and make sure that no issue brought to us is overlooked. Because a student may have his problem looked at by more than one stutechie we place a strong emphasis on documenting the problems we see in RT, giving the stutechies an opportunity to practice their written technical communication.
StuTech is on the surface a very outward-facing, community-oriented group, but that is not where its biggest benefits lie. The learning opportunities that (groups like) StuTech can create for students can not be under-emphasized. StuTech is the ultimate in self-directed learning, a group of students sharing a common passion and learning about it together. The strong student led nature of StuTech means that there is no required learning, just exploring of passions. As much as I love helping students as a whole, it is the opportunities that StuTech offers its members that makes it such an amazing organization.
This post is the first in a series of three posts. The second post in the series will finish discussing the benefits StuTech members and students, as a whole, accrue from having a group like StuTech at their school. The final post will discuss the work StuTech does with teachers in their classrooms.
What questions do you have about StuTech and how it operates? Do you have other examples of groups that are accomplishing similar types of Collaborative Learning?
Actually, Mr. Watson (the link to his blog is in my post) is one of the technology coordinators in our school. On his blog he talks about our system, and some of his ideas for the future. He was one of the teachers who started blogging in English classrooms.
Students leading students... possibilities are almost endless.
Nice to see tech support discussed as an authentic learning opportunity, not just a way to keep people comfy with the machines.
You’ve got a good teacher’s instinct in you. Look forward to more. Seriously. (I feared this would be an overly tech-y post, if you couldn’t tell. It wasn’t. *whew*)
Thanks for the specifics, too. I will pass this along to my school folks.
Thanks for the links, I’ve permatabbed them all to read later. Looking forward to the other posts.
what does continue to fascinate (or, rather alarm me) is that many schools today would rather spend technology dollars on hardware instead of training.
As a benfactor — if you walked into any school today and offered them $5,000 to go towards technology — I’d argue that 95% of them would buy new equipment with the money. Very few would use those dollars to train the staff on the existing equipment they already have that goes underutilized because of the fear factor.
At MICDS students have an average one unscheduled period (of 7 periods per day) that is a “free period”. This is basically a study hall, but students may do as they wish and do not have to report to any specific location. Because we have more students than periods in a day, there is a stutechie available almost every period.
I have been in the very fortunate position of being able to develop and run stutech almost entirely autonomously since its inception. In the rare event that “adult intervention” is needed in an issue I turn to one of Ms. Helfant (Upper School Coordinator of Instructional Technology), a member of our Technology Department, or a Dean (administration). This ability to work with little faculty/staff oversight has been, I believe, a key component to StuTech’s successful development.
@ Mr. Hogan:
I really like your idea of assigning students to groups of teachers, but it falls counter to one of the principles I have tried to follow when developing StuTech: the stutechies are invited to spend as much time as they wish helping out, however they decide their level of participation. As a student who over four years of high school has succeeded in overcommitting himself many times over, I do not want to see the same thing happen to the kids who I wrangle into being stutechies, especially if they are not enjoying it. I have some kids who spend every free period in the StuTech room, and others who are happy to help if I ask them, but don’t “hang out” in there with us. Besides, if the kids aren’t enjoying their time in StuTech, they aren’t going to learn or be helpful. Some kids find out that the type of work StuTech does “isn’t for them”, and that is fine with me: “to each his own”.
I also agree with you on your point about training, but it makes me wonder if not only is our existing tech underutilized, but also our existing training resources (also due to the “fear factor”). I have seen too many teachers at my school not attend “mandatory” training sessions. That “lack of interest” in traditional training is one of the problems that StuTech is trying to solve, but more about that in a later post.
I would hope that the teachers in your district followed this example and created teachtech.
I suppose there’s no hope of an adminitech...
diane
For a simple one semester tech credit, my students ran the class like a small business complete with a student project manager each period who assigned jobs and handled the schedules. The kids created the documentation for how they handled two types of jobs: work orders vs. tutorials. Work orders were projects involving them creating either a document, webpage, presentation, etc. for a teacher or classroom.
Tutorials required students to go to a teacher’s class or provide one on one instruction to a teacher or student. The way we handled tutorials was to provide one or two students per lab to be the tech support and to let the teacher teach the content.
The teachers and the students loved it and it was tremendously successful on many levels. I wish my current district would look into this program and others like it. Perhaps other districts and high schools would consider it as well.
Thanks for getting this conversation going worldwide!