Tech Team

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Tech Team Year End Reflection

  1. Describe your project. What did you do? How did you do it?
    1. This year, we wanted to increase the impact of the Instagram page, @rapidevent. We came up with many potential ways of reaching out to the school and community more, as well as developing a foundation for getting more information out to students.
    2. We did this by coordinating a schedule for posting, individualizing our roles so that there was room for individual creativity, regular meetings, and a WhatsApp group chat.
  2. What problems did you run into? Were you able to solve these challenges? How did you solve these challenges? Is there anything you would do differently?
    1. The biggest problem we ran into was content. It is difficult to figure out ways to reach out to the student body when we don’t actually know what the students are doing that warrants attention on social media. Therefore, a lot of our ideas failed to be realized. Next year, the social media team should be more diligent with school outreach and consistent in their efforts to boost the page.
  3. What did you learn? Were you able to learn new skills or strengthen previous ones?
    1. I learned basic graphic design through using the app Canva to create informational posts.
    2. I also learned the importance of effective communication on social media. Running a popular social media platform seems easy in theory, but in reality, requires a lot of diligence, creativity, and patience. I understand now why social media managers get paid so much.
    1. Impact: How might your project positively impact the social and emotional wellbeing of students/our school? What can be done to increase the impact of this idea on the school?
      1. @RapidEvent’s goal is to communicate what students need to know, either about events in the school or potential opportunities. We wanted to expand this goal to foster a sense of community at Riverside by integrating Rapid achievement with technology. By promoting the page more and diversifying our content, we can accomplish this.
    2. Desirability: What could you change to make your project more desirable to students, teachers, administrators, parents, or the community?
      1. Diversifying our content to include student/teacher achievement, community opportunities/events, and other cool social media stuff.
    3. Integrability: What would you change to make this idea easier to integrate into a school setting?
      1. I would give students the platform to publicize the cool things they are doing. By allowing and advertising student submissions, we can get a better idea of what the student body is doing and how to best target the platform to them and their achievements.
    4. Feasibility: Looking back, what would you change? What would you keep?
      1. I would increase the amount of accountability on the team, possibly by increasing the number of members. I would also enforce specific roles and ensure that team members are capable of fulfilling them. I would keep everything else: it’s a pretty well-oiled machine, we just wanted to do more than we had the time for.
    5. What did you learn from being a part of this project?
      1. The importance of communication, both on social media with a community and between members of a team.

 

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Tech Team Innovation

What aspects of Tech Team are successful? Explain why.

  • The Grade 9 Digital Bootcamp is always a success. We’ve taken the time to refine our methods and perfect the afternoon and are still constantly looking for ways to improve it. Having students there helping lead the sessions is a great way to make incoming students feel supported by their student body.
  • Having Tech Team kids at other events held at the school, like pro-d days, is a great way for students to have their voices heard when it comes to the use of technology in education.
  • Students in Tech Team are motivated to innovate and offering us the opportunity to work on other projects with resources made available to us through Tech Team is a great way to maintain that passion for technology and innovation.
  • Having students provide support to other students and teachers is an excellent way to get across the idea that technology is a tool used to enhance learning and is adaptable to your personal learning style. When students see examples of the ways other students are using technology to innovate, they are inspired to do the same.

What aspects of Tech Team are challenging? Explain why.

  • Proactively providing technical support to everyone at Riverside. A lot of students don’t know the Tech Team even exists, so they don’t get solutions to their problems. If there were a more streamlined process to seek tech support from students, the purpose of the Tech Team would be more realized.

What support does our school need from the Tech Team moving forward? Explain why.

  • Easier access to one-on-one tech support. The use of technology in classrooms would be easier if students knew they could access support whenever they need it, even if their computers aren’t acting up. Constant access to somebody who can explain Edublog, Microsoft, etc. would go a long way in facilitating digital education.
  • A more vocal Tech Team! If the students in Tech Team made an effort to showcase our efforts and accomplishments, more students would learn the cool things they can do at Riverside and would take advantage of the many resources we have, like the soon-to-be Makerspace.

What can we do to improve our support for our school?

  • Comprehensive training for new members. If everyone is able to work on the same knowledge base of basic tech support – Microsoft program fixes, computer troubleshooting, etc. – then Tech Team members may feel more confident in providing support to their students.

What are some things other Tech Teams are doing that we may want to apply at Riverside?

  • Websites for students at their own schools to access for information
  • An outlet for interested students to explore opportunities in technology
  • Television network
  • Collaboration with other schools – network of tech kids

Has your research created any ideas that the Tech Team can implement here?

  • I really like the idea of a tech team website that students can access for basic information for troubleshooting and tech-related opportunities at school and the community. It would take some weight of our shoulders in terms of how many little fixes we need to do, and also connect us with the school better.

Focusing more on enabling Tech Team students to do cool things would also be awesome. We do some of that already, but maybe providing more time for us to work on these initiatives (maybe organized after-school sessions?) would better enable us to further them

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Tech Team December Reflection

What are some things you have learned and/or tasks you have accomplished so far this semester? Explain thoroughly (Use videos, pictures, upload materials etc. as evidence of learning in your blog)

  • As part of my work with the Eddy, I had to develop a one page newspaper to advertise Newsies. By using skills I gained with Tech Team (resourcefulness through technological curiosity), I formatted the newspaper with no prior experience. I’m quite proud of it. 
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  • I also got to see how the Makerspace project I spent a good part of last year working on is turning out through the recent library renovations. It’s a little weird to see it all come to life. 

What aspects of your work are successful? What aspects of your work are challenging? What steps did you take to overcome these challenges / what adjustments did you need to make? Is there anything you can do improve? (with your approach to the project, or altering the project)

  • I’m combining these questions because while the majority of my work was successful, actually getting the work done was challenging. I regularly help students and teachers with technological issues and update Rapidevent, but school has been so busy lately that I haven’t had the time nor energy to really invest myself in any new projects. I hope that, after all my university applications are done, I will have more free time at school to dedicate myself to the social media time and any other projects that involve Tech Team members.

Do you have any feedback or suggestions, as we move forward, that could help the Tech Team meet the needs of our school and staff / be more effective? (Provide specific examples)

  • I think the rapidevent newsletter will be beneficial to the school community in keeping everyone updated and aware about things they can be apart of.
  • In terms of tech support, I think making it more clear to students and teachers how and where they can seek out help would help decrease the amount of stress many members of the school feel when it comes to technology. Having the WAVE consistently staffed would help, as well as perhaps creating a “Common Issues” document available in every classroom so teachers could help resolve student issues.
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Tech Team Project

a) Briefly describe your new and improved idea, by incorporating ideas and/or feedback.

This year, rather than delivering information to students about various things happening in the school, we want to expand our influence by engaging more with the Rapid community through showcasing what makes Riverside, Riverside. We also want to help students become more involved with the community by connecting with local organizations to distribute information about various events and initiatives relevant to RSS students, as well as making it easier for students to access all relevant information through the publication of a weekly newsletter.

b) Answer the following questions:

What problems might we run into?

  • Teenagers are difficult to engage with, so we might not see as much engagement as we like.
  • As we rely on getting information from other organizations in the school and community, we may find some difficulty in getting that information in a timely manner.
  • We want to try a lot of new things this year, and some of those new things will work better than others. Navigating the best way to showcase Riverside will be a challenge, but I’m sure we can make it work.

What skills do we need to complete this project? How can we attain these skills?

  • Consistency! We need to make sure we stay on top of posting and outreach. By having more people on the team this year, we can all help each other out and remind each other about our tasks.
  • Public relations (PR): how do you engage with large groups of people through social media? Alongside tech savviness, we will need to look at other successful social media platforms and see what they do. Learn from the pros!

c) Create a brief timeline of key things that need to happen to ensure successful completion of your project. What happens next?

First two weeks of January

  • Connect with Athletic Leadership to receive updates on sporting events
  • Start up newsletter. Get rapidevent on the RAP emailing list and establish format for newsletter. This will be one person’s specific task.
  • Maybe: partner with the Eddy to keep a consistently updating stream of relevant information on riversideeddy.ca

Month of January

  • Throwback Thursdays! Encourage teachers to send us photos of themselves from when they were young(er), and post them. The goal is to engage more followers with rapidevent.

Before Spring Break

  • Promo Video: Create a short video advertising the social media. Encourage students/parents/community members to follow.
  • Reach out to community organizations, offering up our services to advertise their initiatives to the school.
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TechTeamEdublog

a) What Widgets and Plugins did you choose?

Custom CSS, Embed Any Document, Supreme Google Web-fonts

b) What are their strengths?

CSS lets students who want to become more comfortable with coding and web design do so on an easy-to-use website already created for them.

Embed Any Document does wonders in posting assignments and maintaining the blog’s aesthetic. It also helps assure that documents you post can actually be seen by visitors to your blog (a common issue when you simply try to add it with the Media tool).

Google Web-fonts has Times New Roman, a font that I am impartial to because I love it.

c) What are their weaknesses?

The CSS does not include a preview option, so unless the user has an in-depth knowledge of coding, then it is difficult to use. Also, as far as I can tell, there is no way to specify exactly where you want to change or add code.

Embed Any Document does occasionally experience glitches where it only shows the embed code. However, it is still infinitely better than the basic WordPress Media tool.

Web-fonts has Comic Sans. ☹

d) Can these programs be used in a classroom setting to enhance student learning? Would you use it and/or recommend it?

CSS would be excellent for the programming/ICT classes for a website design unit. If I were a teacher, I would definitely try to format a lesson around it. However, I cannot see it being used in any other context.,

Embed Any Document should be used by every student who ever needs to add a document to their Edublog. Definitely should be activated on every blog.

Web-fonts is helpful for those of us who are picky about their fonts or like to change it up a bit, but not really that vital to educational success.