This past Friday, the Burlington High School help desk had the opportunity to present at the ACTEM 2012 conference in Maine. Initially we had planned on attending in person, however; schedule conflicts prevented us from attending. Alice Barr, an Instructional Technology Coordinator from Yarmouth, ME, offered to help us setup a Google Hangout and present virtually.
Our session was in the form of a panel discussion with our student run help desk. We shared our story along with first hand accounts of the course from the students who make it up. The talk started at 11am and we presented an overview of our school and the course. We then took questions from the audience. Without any hesitation, the students on our panel, which consisted of Hannah Lienhard, Yash Kamani, Michael Lockney, and Andrew Abou-Rjaily, began to field and answer questions from the audience. One question asked students, “How do you deal with your peers if you find them breaking your AUP policy?” Michael and Andrew relayed how it presents an awkward situation to confront your peers, however; they stressed why it is important to follow our AUP and how if we don’t, it could affect the availability of technology resources and privileges in the future.
The next question asked the students, “What is it like to share something new with a teacher or administrator and how is your idea or suggestion received?” Hannah Lienhard shared her experience working at our three day Burlington Public Schools Professional Development Conference held the week before classes resume. She shared how most of her suggestions and ideas were “well received by faculty and administration who sought out her help”. And she added, “working with teachers in this capacity, outside of the normal structure of school, is like being at Disney when all the characters take off their masks and reveal themselves. It was great to see and experience first hand teachers and students learning together.”
The help desk students did a great job sharing their learning and experiences with the audience at the ACTEM conference and continue to share their expertise and talents through the BHS Student Help Desk website on a daily basis.
This course, to some, may seem thin on content and experiences, but I, along with my colleague Tim Calvin, see great things from the help desk students. We see an energy and passion to create, learn, take risks, and share what we are learning. We see students excited to learn new concepts and share it with a larger audience. We see students driven to innovate and invariably curious. It is a course where we don’t always know the right answers, but we know how and where to find them by asking the right questions. And above all, we are always ready to listen and share.
The help desk at Burlington High School runs a little differently. Instructional technology specialists Andy Marcinek and Tim Calvin each teach three sections of “Student Technology Integration,” modeled after Apple’s Genius Bar. Students go through interviews, submit resumes and solve problems in an interview before they can participate.
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