“Students are reversing roles at Jamesville-DeWitt High School, where they have become the teachers and are helping faculty learn tricky computer applications.”
GenYES school Jamesville-DeWitt in New York was profiled in the Syracuse Post-Standard last week. We are really proud of the recognition these students got from their local newspaper. How much better is this than portraying youth as crazed techno-zombies who only care about stealing music and texting!
Stephen D. Cannerelli/The Post-Standard. Jamesville-DeWitt High School students Kaylee Yaeger (left), a junior, and Victoria Nandal, a senior, learn to use software to create a question and answer program on a Smart Board. Students at J-D can take an elective class, Teaching, Leadership and Communications, to learn about various technologies. The students then teach the teachers how to use them.
“It’s absolutely great,” said English teacher Terri Skeele, who’s been receiving help on using her Blackboard from high school senior Greg Werbowsky. “I would spend hours trying to figure out the little quirky things…, and then they revamped the site this summer, which made it harder. So having help like this is a huge timesaver for me.”
Sure - a tech specialist could have taught (and then re-taught) this teacher how to use the system. But perhaps you are saying to yourself - tech specialists? Who has those anymore? In that case, it’s even more important to create internal capacity for teacher support. And why not have students be part of that solution.
Because of course, the teachers are not the only ones benefiting from the interaction - the GenYES students get untold rewards from doing this mentoring.
Great job JD GenYESers!
Sylvia
[...] great to have a string of stories about the positive impact of student technology teams in schools. Last Wednesday’s story was from New York, today’s is all the way across the country in Washington in The Olympian, the newspaper of the [...]