Tag Archives: 21st Century skills

Developing Student Help Desk Programs

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I’ve been working with several states and districts to help them develop student help desk programs. No, I still can’t fix your computer; although, I can probably do more than before. I’m working with them from the curriculum and instruction perspective in order to help high school students become prepared to take industry-level certifications. The following is cross-posted with Advanced Learning Partnerships, a consulting group from North Carolina that I work with.

“The solution to your workforce problem is in your classrooms!” Or so says Caroline Sullivan. And why should you believe Caroline? As the Executive Director for the North Carolina Business Committee for Education (NCBCE) in the Office of the Governor for that state, workforce issues are at the forefront of her mind, and her daily work. Plus she knows about schools. She’s led numerous successful initiatives within her state that connect what teachers and students are doing in classrooms to address the needs in business and industry. One of the most recent of these, providing support for schools and districts to develop their own Student Help Desks, addresses an area of high need in schools and beyond.

A Growing Need for Help Desk Support

In 2020, as schools grappled with addressing the needs of students through remote learning, many strove to provide as many students as possible with their own computing device. This immediate need for devices was matched with funding—lots of funding! Thousands upon thousands of devices began showing up in districts and found their way into students’ hands to keep the learning going. The catch? Much of the funding could be used to purchase equipment, but unfortunately, not to hire personnel. School districts that were seeing a few thousand to 50,000 or more new devices now had to find a way to support them and keep them running, because technology is great…when? When it works!

Most school districts are already strapped for sufficient tech support. Schools have long been a setting where each tech staff member routinely supports 1,000 to 3,000 devices or more, as compared to a range of 50 to 100 in many corporate settings. As districts across the nation brought in from a few hundred to tens of thousands of new devices in the span of a few weeks or months, the need for additional tech staff multiplied exponentially. Even by the conservative estimate of 1,000 devices per support position, district tech staffing positions should have expanded anywhere from a handful to dozens of employees. The reality was that few new staff were hired.

Seeing the rapidly growing need for tech support and realizing funds were coming into the state, Caroline Sullivan led NCBCE’s efforts for a more homespun strategy that built capacity within local schools and districts—Student Help Desk programs. Working with Advanced Learning Partnerships and supported by a network of industry leaders, consultants at ALP developed models and created resources that could be used by teachers throughout North Carolina, teachers like Tiffany Taylor from Halifax County.

Halifax County recruited Tiffany for the new adventure of creating a Student Help Desk and preparing students with both the technical as well as inter- and intrapersonal skills required to provide customer service on the devices they and their fellow students now had in hand. They also were being prepared to service the devices teachers, administrators, and other staff relied on every day. Up for the challenge, Tiffany just needed a little help.

Finding Support

That help came in the form of coaching and curriculum design support from Advanced Learning Partnerships. Halifax County chose a class-based model to prepare their students to run the Help Desk. As a consultant with ALP, I worked with Tiffany to develop a simulated workplace environment in her new classroom that incorporated a problem-based approach to help students develop new skills. The curriculum was sequenced to prepare students to not only operate the Help Desk but to earn valuable industry-standard certifications, as well. Students who completed the first course would be prepared to take the certification exam for CompTIA’s IT Fundamentals+ while completing the full three-course sequence would prepare them for CompTIA’s A+ certification, widely recognized as the gateway to many IT careers.

Students developed teamwork and communication skills by creating work teams with their own norms and roles. They better understood standard Help Desk processes aligned to a service delivery model by using and updating their own Help Desk knowledge base. They developed technology skills not only with their teacher, Tiffany, but also with collaboration from IT support staff who were able to share common problems of practice from their own help desk experiences. Halifax outsourced some of its tech support to YCM Solutions, a local IT company. YCM staff created videos and, when possible, conducted hands-on labs with students focused on skills such as setting up and configuring a desktop computer, creating a wired or wireless network, and troubleshooting common issues.

Help Desk Options

ALP is replicating the Help Desk model and customizing it in additional school districts and states across the country. The need for IT support for schools can be found in districts large and small and ALP understands this need. The models piloted in North Carolina include the course-based setting as well as options for creating an afterschool club or incorporating Help Desk duties into a paid or unpaid internship. Schools can determine which of these three options best fit depending on their current course offerings as well as the skill levels of available student participants. 

Afterschool programs provide the fewest number of contact hours but can be a great way to build student interest and provide opportunities for students to develop some basic skills if they don’t have the opportunity to take a structured class. Internships rely on students with more deeply developed technical skills but then allow students to apply those in real settings while they learn about the procedures and tools used to support a Help Desk service delivery model. Many states have Career and Technical Education programs that provide guidance on student intern programs that can easily support a Student Help Desk.

Are you interested in a Student Help Desk?

One of the most enticing aspects of a student Help Desk is its flexibility. Yes, students can be provided the opportunity to earn course credit along with industry certifications, but different programs vary their focus areas to address a variety of certifications and courses, including cybersecurity, networking, and many popular hardware and software certifications. Some Help Desk programs can include aspects of training or professional development where students actually help teachers and other staff understand how to use resources provided by the district. 

Of course, schools and districts are also seeing the benefit of increasing the number of qualified personnel who can provide tech support. Sometimes these students move from interns to paid support staff, whether within their own school districts or in local area businesses that need them, like hospitals, libraries, or anywhere computers can be found.

Are you interested in establishing a Student Help Desk program in your state, district, or school? Reach out to the experienced consultants of Advanced Learning Partnerships to schedule a discovery session today. Those computers aren’t going to fix themselves! Reach out and let ALP get you started on a program that rewards both you and your students.

Be a Model Digital Citizen

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This summer I attended a great session in San Antonio with Julie Paddock (@jpaddock-tech) and Nancy Watson (@nancywtech), co-chairs of ISTE’s Digital Citizenship PLN (@DigCitPLN). They were great presenters and models, both for engaging presentation skills and promoting digital citizenship. I learned some new great ideas from Julie, Nancy, and the other participants, but one message resonated clearly: “Digital Citizenship is…the way you need to teach, ALL the time.”

I hadn’t previously considered the implications of their message, but it makes a lot of sense. Too many of the districts I work with take the approach of tackling digital citizenship through a one-day workshop or a citizenship lesson or two at the beginning of the year. Despite the best of intentions, this can cause digital citizenship to become an add-on, or worse, forgettable as the school year goes on. My goal was to take up the banner and try to encourage educators in some of my districts to model digital citizenship every lesson, every day.

ModelING Digital Citizenship: It’s Your Choice

Later in the summer I was presenting at one of those summer kick-off workshops that is typical of the approach Julie and Nancy were encouraging us to move beyond. It is what it is, however, and districts have to work within constraints, so I decided to try to move towards a more encompassing approach to digital citizenship within the limits of a three-hour workshop. What to do? Give them choice!

Taking a nod from many of my elementary colleagues, I created this choice board to help my teachers Be a Model Digital Citizen. The focus is providing educators the opportunity to explore the various facets of digital citizenship so they can “model positive digital citizenship every class, every day.” The categories are my interpretation of key components of the Digital Citizen standard from the new ISTE Standards for Students. Because we are ALL digital citizens, whether we want to be or not, the first level of the board is Citizen, and I encourage you to at least progress to the level of Model. You can challenge yourself to earn points to move up levels, if you prefer, because you may already have higher goals.

Full directions for options for using the choice board are at the beginning of the document. The idea is that educators—and it truly was educators as I had many counselors attend my sessions—can enter the digital citizenship discussion at their own level of comfort and expertise. Some may need further information about a key area of digital citizenship, while others are ready to move towards a more collaborative approach both within and beyond one’s school. The skills build in intensity from short individual tasks to collaborative ones that can take a significant amount of time to complete. You decide your goal and the actions you plan to take. Each activity links to a range of resources to get you started on modeling new citizenship skills every day.

Please feel free to use and share the choice board, and please let me know how you used it and how it worked out. I’m open to suggestion for improving it. I need to send out thanks to my colleague Dr. Kendall Latham, who reviewed and improved the board as it was being developed. I also want to thank Alice Keeler for her Digital Citizenship Badge Collector that several of my teachers really enjoyed using to track their progress.

Digital Citizenship Choice Board

What do you want to create today?

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Transformers by Mary Kim SchreckMore than a few years ago I had the opportunity to dig deeper into the ideas of creativity and creative thinking thanks to the wonderful Mary Kim Schreck. She was thinking about, writing about, and sharing her ideas about creativity in her book, Transformers: Creative Teachers for the 21st Century. She had been thinking about creativity so much that she was about done with the book! But she asked me to contribute a chapter about technology in the creative classroom.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been thinking about creativity most of my career! I taught music and most people segregate musicians into a small, select group of “creatives,” that includes visual artists, actors, dancers, writers and a few others. But creativity is not the purview of the few. Everyone can be creative, and in fact, we need more people to be creative in their lives and in their work, now more than ever. I appreciate that Mary Kim gave me a reason to dig deeper into my own ideas about creativity and to compare them to others. It was a valuable experience and, luckily, I get to keep thinking about creativity.

The Value of Performance

I cringe a bit when I see or hear the directions “be creative” in an assignment, because usually this is followed up by using crayons, markers, or different backgrounds in a slide deck. Students are encouraged to “be creative” without ever teaching them what that means. And what does that mean in, say, science? Or math? It’s not the same as in my class. What few teachers realize is that we folks in the creative fields had content standards we had to address, and just like every other class, some of our standards promoted creative thinking, some did not. The important message here is, yes, science, math, and all the others have standards that promote creative thinking.

As a former high school band director I often reflect back on what was then a somewhat routine conversation that has turned out to have significant impact on my life. I had been through my annual observation with my principal, something all teachers go through. My principal, Dr. Barry Beers, was great to work with and full of ideas that pushed and stretched his teachers. I didn’t realize how valuable that was at the time. During our follow-up conference he said to me, “John, I really appreciate how you move from whole group, small group, to individuals, and back and forth whenever you need to. You’re customizing your instruction to the needs of each student.”

I replied to him, hopefully not too snarkily, something like, “Dr. Beers (I still have a hard time calling him Barry), I was just doing a rehearsal. That’s what musicians to do get ready for a performance. Nothing special.”

He tried to help me see the importance of what was going on, but I didn’t really understand his statement until later. Because everything my students did in my class eventually led to a performance, he tried to help me understand how a performance can only be successful when all of the students can play their part, literally. He reminded me that by working with all of the students individually and in groups during rehearsal that I knew who was ready and who still needed work. Then he challenged me.

Learning-Driven Schools by Barry BeersDr. Beers asked me to help teachers in other content areas understand how they can help their students learn how to “perform” their content. Whether math, science, English or whatever, Barry wanted me to help other teachers in other content areas understand how to help their students rehearse so they’d be better prepared to perform in a more authentic context. He enlisted all the Fine Arts staff, and I collaborated with a social studies teacher one year, English the next. It was a challenge, but it helped me to see connections I hadn’t seen before. So, thanks Barry, for thinking creatively about teaching and learning back then.

You can find out more about Barry’s work in his book Learning-Driven Schools: A Practical Guide for Teachers and Principals from ASCD.

Performance in All Classrooms

Recently, perhaps in reaction to the horribly mind-numbing compliance mentality promoted by federal education policy, the education community is once again seeing the value of performance. I saw this in the release of new college-and-career standards both at the national and state level. New standards in the core areas and the arts definitely push students to work towards levels of creative thinking in their domains. And now, in many states, students demonstrate higher levels of learning through performance.

The best performances are not compliance. They’re not mechanical. They’re not simply the replication of what someone has done before. They’re not multiple choice. The best performances give people a chance to be creative—to pull their knowledge and skills together—to address a real problem or situation in or across content domains.

In this way, creativity is a cumulative skill. I liken it to the top level of the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy. You can’t get to the top without working you’re way up. You have to have the foundational knowledge and skills of any domain you plan to be creative in—whether that’s writing, speaking, visual or performing arts, or science, or engineering, or even legislation. You have to know what the accepted strategies and processes are before you can change them. In other words, you have to know the rules before you can break them.You have to understand what work has come before and to analyze and evaluate information in order to provide a creative solution to address a problem.

Revised Bloom's Taxonomy

One interpretation of the cognitive process dimension from the revised Taxonomy of Learning by Anderson & Krathwohl (2001)

Ideas that don’t build on a foundation are not creative. They’re simply novelty. And novelty wears thin fast and falls apart. Creativity has weight, value, and lasting appeal.

The most creative ideas can live a long time—in an individual, a group, or society, but everyone can be creative as we are all faced with authentic problems that are routinely found in the real world. We need creative solutions for providing affordable housing to everyone no matter where they live. We need creative solutions on how to ensure our planet will be able to sustain us. We also need creative solutions to simply provide the best education to each generation of students.

Creativity: Imaginative processes with outcomes that are original and of value.

Sir Ken Robinson
“Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative” (2001)

What do you want to create today?

I’ve been given another chance to continue my musings about creativity. I’m very honored that Dell and Advanced Learning Partnerships have asked me to share my ideas and some of the work we’ve done in districts across the nation around promoting instruction and assessments that encourage creative thinking. Dell is calling these events, appropriately enough, “What do you want to create today?”

We’ll talk a bit about creativity and why it’s important, but the main plan is to co-create ideas of how creative thinking can be promoted in all classrooms—not just a few. We’ll explore performance tasks—something I’ve been immersed in for years (like this one a creative teacher from Lake Travis ISD just Tweeted out), but we’ll also explore how preparing kids to perform (in math, or English, or whatever) has deep implications for all curricula.

At these events I’m looking forward to hearing from district leaders from across the country who are promoting creative thinking in their own schools, and we’ll share ideas on how we can help every student in every classroom experience learning that helps them develop critical and creative thinking and perform what they’ve learned. I look forward to hearing your ideas whether you can attend one of these events or not.