A couple of years ago, we started thinking about the idea of a student run tech team. It’s not something we can take credit for coming up with. There are numerous examples on the internet, with some secondary institutions even offering a course for credit. Check this link as well for more details:
Student Tech Teams 101: A Toolkit for Educators
I think there is great value in empowering the students at your school to help others and to create a method to offer their assistance in a more “official” capacity.
A couple years ago, under the guidance of Maria Marino at Adelaide Hoodless, we created the Student Technology Assistance Team, or STAT team. Leveraging a ticketing system built within the Commons, we created a means for teachers and students to connect with the team for support. You can check out the archive of this project at this site: https://stat006.commons.hwdsb.on.ca/
The number references the school number, an internal reference we use at HWDSB. Signed in users could create tickets, and then the team could take on tasks, assigning tickets to themselves, and finding opportunities to help others around the school. The team met once a week to hone their own technology skills, to ask questions of each other, and to help answer tough questions.
The idea here is not to replace the Instructional and Information Technology Technician assigned to the school, so the teacher running this extra-curricular opportunity needs to understand what tickets are better left to the professionals, and what tickets make sense for students to assist with. Tickets requiring a technician need to be redirected appropriately.
The tasks students ended up helping with included assisting with Google Drive, building out websites on the Commons, helping younger students to get logged into web tools, understanding how an app or website works, or explaining the differences between something like Airplay and Airdrop. Here’s the site from the example above. You can see from the blog posts the types of support that you could offer: https://bhshelpdesk.com/
I would love to set up more of these around the system this year. If you are interested in exploring this, please reach out in the comments here, via Twitter, or through board email.
Readers who are not from HWDSB will need a WordPress installation and this theme to spin up something similar.