Edutopia - June/July 2008 - (Page 42)

Tech Without Support Schools get creative when untangling PC problems. By Alexandra R. Moses arry Costner’s eighth graders trickle into class, get their assignments for the day, and grab the tools they need to complete them. Like a real TV newsroom, these video-journalism students take small video cameras, hook them up to computers, and launch the necessary programs to edit hours of raw footage into a polished graduation video. Outside Costner’s Gunston Middle School classroom, in Arlington, Virginia, students in a geography class see part of their lesson on an interactive whiteboard. After school, kids in a podcasting club produce the Buzzwords podcast available on iTunes. Drama and art students collaborate with the video-journalism kids to create claymation videos for Black History Month. These creative technology initiatives couldn’t happen without Gunston’s ⇒ve-person technology team. The school’s English teacher likens the tech experience at Gunston to a honeymoon compared to other schools where he has taught: schools like many across the country that get the computers, the network, and the latest digital teaching tools, but don’t have anyone at the school—or in some cases, the school district—to get it all up and running, ⇒x it when it breaks, or show teachers how to use it. H limit for how fast new technology makes it into classrooms. And it’s hardly a racecourse for some. It’s not that having a tech person is new; it’s that technology has rapidly become integral to education, from keeping attendance records to using digital video to teach Chaucer, and the demands on that one person have multiplied exponentially. In schools lacking even a single support person (and many do, with large districts like San Francisco Uni⇒ed Schools reporting the equivalent of one tech support person for every 3,000 students), the result is that teachers simply don’t use technology—not just the advanced stuff, but basic items like classroom computers. Rene Mitsui, a second-grade teacher at San Francisco’s Dianne Feinstein Elementary School, says she got rid of two of her ⇒ve classroom computers because they were “junk” and she had better uses for the space. Mitsui says work orders put in for repairs or to get applications installed take days to ⇒ll because there is so little tech support for the district. Students to the Rescue Without the money to add support staff, schools must use alternatives such as teachers and students to make the most of cutting-edge educational technology. James Tenbusch, superintendent of District 181, in Hinsdale, Illinois, says one such alternative is getting the tech-savvy people at the school to be part of the support chain. “Sometimes that means paying them stipends,” Bad, and Getting Worse Nearly half of educators surveyed by the National Education Association said insuf⇒cient support impacted their use of technology. The result: Tech support may be setting the speed Tenbusch says. “Sometimes that means having the kids earn a little money on the side.” At Zion-Benton Township High School, in northern Illinois, for instance, students in the TechCrew club spend a couple of hours after school ⇒xing computer problems. Over the summer, a select group of TechCrew members can earn $8–$9 an hour, thirty hours a week, ⇒xing and upgrading the school’s computers. Schools in Chicago, New York, and California use the Mouse Squad, a program that trains students to be their school’s tech troubleshooters—installing operating systems, setting up printers, performing hardwarerelated tasks, and learning industry-standard processes for resolving support requests. Ted Bongiovanni, director of programs at Mouse, says schools that use Mouse Squad save about $17,000 a year in tech support. Teachers and administrators do have concerns about using students as tech support, especially if they can access the school’s network or data ⇒les. Bongiovanni says administrators can limit where students are allowed—plenty of work can be done even within strict parameters. The student helpers are a bit like teacher’s assistants or interns, says Hannah Kim, who teaches art and computers at Robert F. Wagner Jr. Secondary School for Arts and Technology, in Queens, New York. Though the school has a computer technician, Kim says she ⇒lls in the gaps in addition to full-time teaching duties. The Mouse Squad students and faculty are working to establish a help desk to make her job easier. 42 EDUTOPIA JUNE/JULY 2008

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Edutopia - June/July 2008 Contents UpFront Feedback Dispatches Sage Advice Ask Ellen Head of Class Cool Schools Design Young Minds, Fast Times Wii Love Learning No More Pencils, No More Books Tech Without Support All the Right Moves Room to Learn Heart & Soul Pop Quiz: Jeff Corwin

Edutopia - June/July 2008

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