• What aspects of Tech Team are successful? Explain why.

The team is very diverse, and we are lucky to have a broad range of skills at our disposal. We do a good job at helping with the transition of digital immersion. For example, parent/student tech night for the grade eights or the digital boot camp. Over the years we have been able to continuously improve our system and our success is the result of those improvements. We know the types of questions parents are asking as well as the questions we should be encouraging the parents to ask. We know the struggles many grade 9’s face and how to resolve them quicker. The tech team now has a lot of experience under its belt.

 

• What aspects of Tech Team are challenging? Explain why.

It can be hard to fully accomplish all the goals each team creates. We tend to have very ambitious goals (which is great) however we tend to underestimate the amount of time we need. A new challenge is staying relevant and maintain a presence in the school. The tech team doesn’t have a solid home at the moment, but I think that will improve once we get a designated space back. The newer generations are more familiar with technology now so they are not as needing of our services. We need to make sure that as the newer generations come in with more knowledge, we are continuing to improve ourselves so that we can still assist them and help them grow in terms of their digital literacy.

 

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

The school will need the tech teams support once the library is completed. More specifically the makers space. I believe that the tech team can help establish the library as the go to place for resources. The tech team will also be vital in helping the school fully take advantage of the new equipment of the makers space. This could be through workshops throughout the year, or having someone around to give some basic pointers and tips when people first use the maker’s space.

 

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

I think we can try to find a way to be more active and readily available. One of the issues is not that the members are not available it’s that they can’t be easily contacted. We could also improve our support throughout the middle of the school year to the end. We are also very active in the first month, but it gets quite slow after that. Obviously the beginning of the school year will also be the busiest but we could maintain a higher level of support during the rest of the year than we do presently.

 

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

Many Tech Teams have an accessible website. I think having a website will make it easier for us to be contacted and remain active in the school. It is also a great way to show what the tech team has accomplished and their current projects.  I’ve seen that other schools use their tech team website to get people more involved in their digital learning as well by inspiring them to purse their own passion projects or advertising ways to get involved such as workshops being held in the school or community.

I also read about an elementary school that has a student run genius bar at their school. They also created specific teams that are tasked with teaching students about technology whether that be troubleshooting their educational tools or using the equipment from their makers space.

 

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

I think we can implement version of what I mentioned above in my research. I think a website would be a great addition for  the tech team. A student genius bar is something the tech team used to have back when the wave was used frequently. So bringing that back would be a good idea. We already have specialty groups but having some groups specialize in teaching could be a great addition for the school.