Starting the Tech Team-Part 2

I was excited when I was asked to be the “adult in the room” aka adviser for the Bayshore Tech team, but on the same hand, was not sure how to tackle this task.  The first thing I did was to “Google it” to look for other ideas on how people set up their team, how members were selected, and the types of projects they did.  I knew this would be such a positive experience for the students because it would

• Create student leaders at school
• Encourage teamwork, cooperation, and collaboration
• Practice coding skills
• Give them the opportunity at public speaking
• Encourage digital citizenship
• Help build friendships that crossed grade level boundaries
• Help them create content
• Help them build confidence
• Help them have student voice

We decided we needed a purpose and a mission statement.  After looking at other websites, one of the purposes of a student led team was to act as a help-desk or to staff a “genius bar”.  Though the students have helped troubleshoot basic issues in their teacher's’ classroom, that did not seem like something that would work with the middle school schedule.  We also toyed with the idea of having a “genius bar” but that did not seem like it would work either. You can view our purpose and mission statement by clicking on this link: Bayshore Tech Team Presentation. We finally agreed that we wanted a program that was student led, that had specific tasks (you can view some of the tasks we completed in the presentation) so that we were not scattered and doing too many things at once.  It was difficult to get 20 students to agree on the same task, so team leaders from each grade level were created.

The job of the team leaders was to meet together with me to look at different tasks and decide what we would like to do.  After the leadership team decided on a specific project, their job was to do the groundwork to have as much information to present to the entire Tech Team. Some of our entire team meetings were spent hearing the team leaders’ proposals and deciding the direction we were heading.  Our most current project is the installation of a Lego Wall in room 241.


Dr. Strobel