GenYES article on having students help teachers to integrate technology

This is an interesting article on formally involving students in the entire technology plan of a district or school. The idea is to write student involvement into every step of the official school or district technology improvement plan.

Part of the GenYES approach is to pair students with teachers. The students are first trained in ways to use technology in education, then they work with their teacher partners to develop technology-rich lessons to be part of the teacher's regular curriculum. (Neat idea! This reminds me of something from the k12online conference, I think from Kelley Hines' talk on "Little Kids, Big Possibilities". I THINK it was in her talk that there was an example of a school where each month a different group of kids provides technology professional development to the teachers. That month, the first-graders were doing it!)

The article emphasizes that to be successful, student involvement in tech ed must be included both as a stand-alone goal (to give it importance) and as sub-goals integrated into every section of the plan (because sometimes different departments only really pay attention to "their own" sections).

Include students in developing these goals, so that they will be enthusiastic stakeholders in seeing that they are accomnplished.

GenYES has been around for about ten years, and has a body of research to support its success.

(Very interesting article! Our principal believes strongly in having our fifth-graders do lots of "community service" around the school, and being a tech resource to teachers might be a great addition to our current list of choices. The issues to work out would be providing appropriate training and figuring out when the student-teacher sessions could be scheduled so that the students wouldn't have to miss much regular class time.)