The new school year is here for many teachers. For those who haven’t started school yet, the new school year will be here soon. If you’ve set the goal of trying something new in your classroom this year (shouldn’t that always be one of our goals), here are eleven techy things teachers should try this year.
This blog post offers a nice list of techy things that could be working in your classroom or school – but why wait for teachers to try them?
If any of these things sound good to you – let your students help you out! If you have GenYES students, your own student tech team, or just an interested helper or two, let them do the legwork on investigating a tool and becoming an in-house expert.
Students can then demonstrate these tools in classroom demonstrations, teach teachers how to use them, or be available as mentors during library or computer lab open sessions.
This simple idea helps walk the talk of student empowerment and student-centered technology and helps the new school year start off on the right foot!
At Generation YES, we work hard to make sure that our member schools have the most up-to-date resources to teach students how to help teachers with technology. This summer we’ve added some new activities, including some whole new units with multiple activities to the GenYES online curriculum. Each of these activities comes with teacher preparation, lesson plans, resources, and online “handouts” for students.
We hope these new activities add to long list of technology that GenYES students can learn in order to help teachers throughout their school. While some of these activities may sound like “typical” technology lessons for students, they aren’t. All GenYES lesson plans teach technology to students in the context of helping teachers. The lessons focus on typical uses of technology in schools and include lessons about learning with technology. We think that if you teach students that they are a driving force in improving technology in education, IT WILL HAPPEN!
All new:
A new activity, Web 2.0, has been added to Unit 3: Optional Technology Topics
A new activity, Animation has been added to Unit 6: Digital Media
A new unit, Unit 9: Computer Programming & Game Design has been added to the GenYES curriculum. The three activities included are: 1. Logo, 2. Scratch, 3. Game Design
A new unit, Unit 10: Simulations and Modeling has been added to the curriculum. The four activities included are: 1. Simulations, 2. Google Map, 3. Google Earth, 4. Sketch-up
The GenYES curriculum has 3 units in the basic curriculum that comes with every GenYES site license. These units cover the initial student introduction to GenYES, how to work with and mentor teachers, and basic instruction in technology and tech support. Plus a set of activities and guides about working with the most common hardware and software found in schools. Most schools that have GenYES as a club use the basic curriculum.
The extended GenYES curriculum (for those GenYES schools with daily classes) now has 23 curriculum units covering these over-arching areas:
Technology Units - research and information literacy, online communication, digital media, presentations, web publishing
Technology Support Units – hardware, software, problem solving, customer service, researching and housekeeping
21st Century Units – cybersafety, digital citizenship, social issues, media literacy, media influence, career exploration
Leadership Units – communication, leadership in the 21st century, being a leader, teaching as leadership
Community Service Units – community leaders, community service projects
Each of these units include from 3-8 activities and their associate resources for a current total of 117 activities. And most of these activities span several class periods or club meetings. As you can see, we don’t expect anyone to teach ALL this in a single semester or even a year-long class. Most GenYES teachers pick and choose the activities that best fit their students and the needs of the teachers these students will be working with. Plus, this kind of choice allows schools to establish a path for advanced GenYES students who wish to work on advanced projects with teachers.
All these new activities are immediately available to GenYES schools when they log in to the online GenYES system.
“When middle school students Alison and Nat confer with their teachers, it’s to talk about the lessons the students are preparing for student teachers as part of a new Generation www.Y program. The young people are part of a growing group in schools across the country who are sharing their own expertise to help make prospective teachers more aware of how students learn and the best ways technology can be used to support their learning.”
Edutopia, the website of the George Lucas Educational Foundation published this story and video on the GenYES program in Olympia, WA. The video is from a while back when the model was called Generation www.Y. That was a bit difficult to pronounce, so we changed the name to GenYES.
This video was created during an interesting time period – the GenYES students not only worked with teachers at their school, but formed teams with their teacher and a pre-service teacher. These 3 member teams learned and taught each other technology, and prepared lessons using new technology. Just another way students can be involved in improving education for all!
At the Northwest Council for Computers in Education (NCCE) in Seattle March 2-5, 2010, over 70 students from districts around Washington will be on site to assist. Students from grades 7-12 will help with video and audio production, technical support for attendees, geocaching events, and support for speakers. Generation YES is proud to be a sponsor of these student volunteers. They hail from several local districts that all use the Generation YES models of student technology.
If you are attending NCCE and need technical help during the NCCE conference, just go to the Generation YES Student Tech Support Station. It will be right outside the exhibit hall entrance and will be staffed with trained, helpful students from Tuesday – Friday 9 AM – 5 PM. Students will also be taking photographs, shooting video and doing interviews throughout the conference to document all the events at NCCE. Don’t miss the closing keynote for the debut of their production!
These students work daily in their own schools to help teachers use computers, video and more to make education better for all. If you meet these fine young men and women, you are sure to be impressed with their professionalism and knowledge about technology. They are pros at helping out — they do it all the time!
I won’t personally be at NCCE this year, but if you are a Generation YES blog fan, be sure to stop by and say hello to the students, Dennis Harper, Megan Evander, and Steven Hicks, the rest of the awesome Generation YES team.
Thou shalt talk to actual students and teachers and make time to watch how technology works during actual class time, not just when it’s quiet.
Thou shalt not make fun of the tech skills of teachers or students, nor allow anyone else in the tech department to make disparaging remarks about them.
Closing trouble tickets shalt not be thine highest calling; thou shalt strive to continually make the learning environment better.
Thou shalt not elevate the system above the users.
The network will be never be perfect. Learning is messy. Get thyself over it.
When teaching someone a new skill, keep thy hands off the mouse.
Thou shalt listen to requests with an open mind and respond in plain English.
Blocking shall be controlled by educators, not filtering companies. Thy job is to enable learning, not enforce behavior.
Thou shalt include students and teachers in decision-making about technology purchases and policy. Their interest is not an affront to your professionalism.
GenYes is the ultimate tech group at Shadow Mountain High School! We simply rock when it come to new tech and learning! In addition to tech support for teachers and students, we are implementing educational and social gaming in the media center, telepresence communication with students, academia, scientists across the globe, developing interactive Wii walls and more!
There’s a new blog in town about 1:1 schools, aptly named the 1:1 Schools blog. Scott McLeod of Iowa State University is the organizer of a group of authors who blog about issues, resources, and the special needs of 1:1 schools. I’m happy to be on the team!
Many of our GenYES and TechYES schools are laptop schools. The philosophy of putting the power into student hands with a laptop fits nicely with empowering students to improve education school-wide!
So naturally, my first post for the 1:1 Schools Blog is about student support of laptop programs. Not just tech support, but support for planning, implementation, and teachers. How can students do this? Do students do this? Yes they can and do in schools around the world!
In most schools, students are over 92% of the people in the system, and they are certainly the ones most affected by any change. Yet we often overlook them when we plan and implement visionary efforts like going 1:1. This does not have to be – students, if allowed to participate, can be powerful allies and evangelists for your laptop revolution.
Today, introductory courses in computer science are too often focused merely on teaching students to use software like word processing and spreadsheet programs, said Janice C. Cuny, a program director at the National Science Foundation. The Advanced Placement curriculum, she added, concentrates narrowly on programming. “We’re not showing and teaching kids the magic of computing,” Ms. Cuny said.
Professor Sapna Cheryan led her student into a small classroom in Stanford University’s computer science building. Star Wars posters adorned the walls, discarded computer parts and cans of Coke clustered on a table, and a life-size bust of Spock perched on the desk. “Sorry about the mess,” Cheryan said. “Just ignore that stuff, it’s not part of our study. Here’s your questionnaire. Let me know when you’re done.”
The student took a dubious look at her surroundings and raised her pencil to answer the question: “How interested are you in computer science?”
Cheryan, now a psychologist at the University of Washington, has placed students in situations like this for nearly five years. She has found that women rate themselves as less interested in computer science than men in the “geek room” described above. But in a room decorated more neutrally with art posters, nature photos, and water bottles, their interest levels were about the same.
A few years ago one of our GenYES advisors told me that he was very proud of the fact that his student tech support team was over 50% female. But it wasn’t always that way. He said that it took time and effort to change the culture of the team, but the thing that made the most difference was that he remodeled the “tech room”. He took down the video game posters, brought in a couch, and cleaned it up. His advice to other advisors was that this little thing mattered. He wasn’t sure at the time it was a big deal, but now he’s sure it changed everything.
What does your classroom or clubroom say about who belongs there? And if you aren’t sure, ask some students.
It’s back to school time again in the US! Time for fresh new school supplies, backpacks, or maybe some new laptops?
Student Support of Laptop Programs – new laptops? old laptops? Are you getting the benefit of making students allies in your laptop initiative? Peer mentoring, student-led training on new hardware and software, student tech support and other ideas can be time saving, cost effective, and best of all, good for students and the whole learning community.
This whitepaper contains research, case studies, practical information that you can use right now, whether you have one cart or are a 1:1 laptop school.
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