Summer is here and I am working through some plans from Spring 2018 for Fall 2018. One of the ideas that I am most excited about is a student-led helpdesk in the IT Department to provide assistance and hopefully inspiration to our staff and students.
My first stop along this path was a visit with our CAS Coordinator to discuss the possibility of bridging our DP program and the IT Helpdesk. She was very happy to hear that students could work with us to provide this service to our school community and we had a very productive discussion about CAS itself and the ways that students activities can satisfy that DP requirement.
She also suggested that I immediately begin promoting the IT Helpdesk to students so that they can begin to make their plans for Fall 2018. I placed an information slide in our Daily Report, which is displayed on monitors around our school throughout the school day, and also sent an announcement to the HS student Google Group. I now have half a dozen student volunteers who are eager to help!
I sent out a brief survey to the volunteers to find out more about when and how they would like to help and found that most of them would like to work within the school day (as compared to before or after school or during a lunch break). This means that we will have to wait for scheduling to be completed before we know exactly when they will be available to work the IT Helpdesk, but at least the idea is taking shape: There will be a student-led IT Helpdesk available during the week sometime between 8:30 and 3:15.
The next step is to work with the volunteers to sort out many of the details in early August:
- Where will the IT Helpdesk actually be? In the IT Workroom? In the cafeteria? In a hallway or the reception area?
- Which services can we reasonably offer at a student-led IT Helpdesk?
- How will we tell the school community (staff and students) about this new service?
- What training or support will these students need from me and the IT Department?
As these discussions take place and decisions are made I will post updates here.
What do you think we need to add to our list of considerations?
Aaron Tyo-Dickerson 
Did you implement your student led IT Help desk? Any suggestions, implementation plans, things you learned along the way? Looking to implement in my school for 7th and 8th graders.
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Although I am no longer at that school, we did indeed implement the Help Desk in my time there. The students were able to assist teachers with basic troubleshooting in their classrooms and, if necessary, “escalate” to an actual tech support request. The students enjoyed the work and the teachers were quite pleased with the assistance they received.
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