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!

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

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.

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.

Thanks for the links, I’ve permatabbed them all to read later. Looking forward to the other posts.