Elementary Tech Team

As part of our initiative towards technology integration, a colleague and I created our first ever tech team. This has been a huge opportunity for technology growth, student leadership, and innovation opportunities.

We started tech team simply as a news channel that tech team produced an episode once a week in order to inform parents about different things happening in our school. Now we have 3 departments of tech team.

1. News Team - producing and delivering weekly happenings in our school as a news letter / inside look into the classrooms. This is posted to our school youtube page weekly.
2. Teaching Team - 3-5 grade level students are paired to k-2 grade level groups to teach technology lessons as an extension during interventions. This group has a student leader that guides the conversation in creating lessons to teach to younger grades. They are a student self ran team and only need teacher support to initially form groups/times and check ins as needed.
3. Publishing team - This team is behind the scenes and publishes the weekly news episodes, event posters, and how to videos of different apps and tool updates.

We created an application process where student have the ability to apply for tech team each semester. The fill out a survey with *tech team department interests *teacher approval and a QR code to our file where students upload their application videos.

We have (30 min) weekly meetings once a week to plan the week together and give lessons on quality work, new tools, and collaboration.

Students complete their planned work during our Intervention time. (these particular students do not need multiple academic interventions and have at least 1 out of 2 independent time periods to participate in tech team duties.)

Success outcomes (so far)

• A stronger connection between home and school
• Student leadership and ownership
• Technology integration expanding more rapidly
• Community among grade levels
• Teachers/staff naturally reaching out for more tech integration ideas based on what their students are leaning from other students