ASCD’s magazine Educational Leadership has opened up our article Working with Tech-Savvy Kids for free online access. We really appreciate this!

Today’s students are increasingly savvy about the role technology plays in modern life. Yet schools are not keeping up. Students can be valuable resources in the areas of training and support. Five models have emerged that balance the benefits of service learning and leadership with the needs of schools struggling to integrate technology: students as committee members, students as trainers, students as technical support agents, students as resource developers and communicators, and students as peer mentors and leaders.

The article gives five models of student leadership that can support 21st century learning in schools, with case studies from real schools who use students as leaders, teachers, mentors, and advocates. There is lots more in the article, but here’s a quick “Getting Started” list for student leadership teams focused on technology.

Getting Started

Creating a plan that includes students in school technology decision making and implementation is just the first step. Keep the following in mind:

• Provide student access to training, hardware, and software as needed.
• Give students adequate time and attention to help them grow into their new roles. They will not automatically know how to participate in these opportunities. Encourage a student-led culture with real responsibility that increasingly challenges students to step up and prove themselves. Reward proven responsibility with increased trust.
• Don’t forget your younger students. It’s never too early for authentic learning opportunities, and these students can be surprisingly helpful with concrete, well-defined tasks.
• Plan for turnover. Continually recruit and train new students. Allow veteran student leaders to mentor new recruits.
• Look for ways to encourage long-term student involvement. Make student involvement part of a credit-bearing class, which counts toward graduation or service-learning credits. This involvement can also take the form of independent study or an internship.
• Create an adult advisory position. This person should have a passion for student empowerment. The advisor will monitor participation, recruit and train new members, and facilitate group activities.
• Be sure to include school administration and staff in planning for any for-credit student tech-support classes or similar courses. School counselors need to know that these classes will have high expectations for students to participate, collaborate, and be independent thinkers and leaders. Create a plan to recruit students and persevere, even if the classes are small to begin with.
• Don’t mistake the ease with which youth today use technology in their everyday lives for knowing how to use it in education settings. Teach them the appropriate use of technology and its role in enhancing learning.

Working with Tech-Savvy Kids article (Educational Leadership) – Enjoy!

Sylvia

Connecting Curriculum with Community by Susan Gonsalves, explains this concept with a vibrant mix of research, expert voices, and examples of what students are doing to make a difference at home and around the world.

Be sure to check out the special sidebar called, “Applying Service Learning to Technology,” where one of our Generation YES districts, San Juan School District in California, is profiled. I’ve written about San Juan before, but now a much wider audience can see what a great job they are doing with technology for teachers and students, and how their GenYES students support makes it more likely that technology is used in every classroom. The article quotes Nina Mancina, San Juan’s program specialist for special projects and grants.

“A key component of GenYES is the pairing of students and teachers to find ways to creatively integrate technology programs into the curriculum. “The students become so engaged as they find this connection with teachers, and [the process] gives them a sense of belonging that is very powerful,” Mancina says. Students often act as teachers for a day, giving presentations about the ins and outs of working with a particular computer program in front of an audience of both instructors and peers. They are also called upon to perform technical support when computers break down.”

So, can I do this?
You may be thinking that in this day and age, this is a “nice to have” rather than a “gotta have.” But here are two things that may change your mind. (quoted from article, emphasis mine)

1. Research linking higher academic achievement with service learning projects is limited but growing. This fall, Learn and Serve plans to launch a large-scale study to track and compare student progress by testing in classrooms across the united States with and without service learning. a series of studies by Shelley Billig, vice president of RMC Research Corporation, links higher state test scores with service learning participation. Students in high-quality service learning classrooms also were found to have higher average daily attendance and less tardiness than students from comparison classrooms.
   
2. Funding from Learn and Serve America makes it possible for more than 1.5 million students from kindergarten to college to devote nearly 20 million hours in service learning projects annually in 1,600 local programs across the country. Additionally, about one-quarter of the nation’s elementary and secondary schools have adopted service learning programs, with 40 percent of these making service learning an integral part of their curriculum.

So does that change your mind? Students CAN make a difference, it’s GOOD for them in many different ways, and your school (and teachers) NEED HELP. Why not tie all these together into one package!

Sylvia

Global Youth Service Day is an annual campaign that celebrates and mobilizes the millions of children and youth who improve their communities each day of the year through service and service-learning.

Established in 1988, GYSD is the largest service event in the world and is now celebrated in over 100 countries. On GYSD, children and youth address the world’s most critical issues in partnership with families, schools, community and faith-based organizations, businesses, and governments.

Happy Global Youth Service Day!

Sylvia

Service learning is the Rodney Dangerfield of education. Students say that it’s an “annoying requirement.” Parents say, “My kid will learn more in the classroom than in the community.” Teachers say, “It won’t improve test scores.” Principals say, “It’s a feel-good mandate that kids aren’t capable of understanding.”

Read this article to find out about the six myths and the real facts about service learning. Done right, service learning benefits students both academically and socially, creates opportunities for learning citizenship, empowers youth, and benefits schools and communities. And that’s no myth!

Sylvia

Edutopia, the website of the George Lucas Educational Foundation published this story and video on the GenYES program in Olympia, WA. The video is from a while back when the model was called Generation www.Y. That was a bit difficult to pronounce, so we changed the name to GenYES.

This video was created during an interesting time period – the GenYES students not only worked with teachers at their school, but formed teams with their teacher and a pre-service teacher. These 3 member teams learned and taught each other technology, and prepared lessons using new technology. Just another way students can be involved in improving education for all!

Sylvia

Led by the Corporation for National Service (CNS) with financial support from Microsoft, groups such as Generation YES, MOUSE, CREATE, SWAT, and others have been working together for a couple of months. Our mission is to figure out how to create more visibility nationwide for student service learning in technology

START today announced that six schools will form a core team to experiment and determine what this will mean (press release.) GenYES school Winston Churchill Middle School from the San Juan School District in California joins Tupelo Middle School (Tupelo, MS), Lower Eastside PS 515 (New York), East Garner MS (Garner, NC), Parkway West HS (Philadelphia), and Forest Park HS (Woodbridge, VA).

The announcement today in Washington DC featured a talk by Karen Cator, the new director of educational technology for the US Department of Education. She then led a student panel in a discussion about how powerful the intersection of technology and service learning can be. GenYES teacher Jeff Darrow, from Winston Churchill MS flew out from California to participate and we are extremely proud that Jeff and his students are representing us in this effort. His district, San Juan, has several GenYES schools, all doing wonderful work and so Jeff was not only representing his school, but his district and all the GenYES schools across the country.

There are videos from the schools showing their programs in a START Vimeo group. Here’s the video  from Winston Churchill, our GenYES school.

Churchill S.T.A.R.T Video from Jeff Darrow on Vimeo.

Sylvia

We are calling on educators and web professionals to join our new effort – the 2010 MLK Day Technology Challenge. The idea is simple: to connect schools with technology needs to IT and web professionals, developers, graphic designers and new media professionals who are willing to volunteer their skills for good, take on these technology projects and give back to a school in need.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: what are you doing for others?” We ask that you answer his call in 2010 by participating in the MLK Technology Challenge.

Why not turn this around – how about students offering services to the community or their own school? Why rely on the help of kind-hearted outsiders when there is a tech savvy crew right on campus who just need some guidance to get busy!

The Day of Service website has some great suggestions for projects -

• Enhance the school’s website by creating blogs or discussion groups for various student groups, such as student council, chess club, drama group, dance troupe, or varsity and intramural teams.
• Create a Facebook Fan Page for your school or for your Parent-Teacher’s Association, Student Government Association or Alumni Association.
• Create a NING social network for your school or a school organization.

Of course, all of these things could be done by students.

Even if you bring in outside expertise, include students. You can register your school’s technology need and ask for help by registering your school’s technology need as a “volunteer opportunity” with one of the partner websites listed here.

When you create your volunteer opportunity, be sure to:

1. Use a descriptive title and make sure to include the “MLKTech” keyword – the keyword is necessary for search.
2. Set the date as January 18, 2010

But remember, when you do get volunteer help, include students in the meetings. Let them apprentice with the volunteers so that once the volunteers go back to their real jobs, you still have students who know what to do. Building local capacity pays off in the long run!

Sylvia

• If you don’t experience discomfort every time you’re listening to Youth Voice, you aren’t listening right.
• If you can’t stay engaged enough to simply sit and listen to young people talk, you aren’t being an adult ally.
• If you can’t speak your truth to young people you aren’t in a youth/adult partnership.
• If you can’t expect and accept not having closure when young people share their voices you aren’t being an adult ally.
• Listening to Youth Voice means listening for understanding, rather than to support your own conclusions.
• If you’re an adult ally to young people you’ll engage, support, and challenge them, and not try to fix them. They aren’t broken.
• If you aren’t taking risks you aren’t being an adult ally.

More resources for adults working to empower youth at YoungerWorld.org

Sylvia

Best Practices for Integrating Technology and Service-Learning in a Youth Development Program by JoAnn R. Coe-Regan, PhD and Julie O’Donnell, PhD, MSW.

Community-based programs that are meant to promote youth development have been around for quite awhile. Numerous studies indicate that youths benefit from these programs in many ways: a more positive self-image, a reduction in risk taking behavior, improved school behavior, etc. Because research illustrates the success of after-school programs, federal funding has increased from $40 million to $1 billion in recent years. A ubiquitous and recurring challenge these programs face is how to recruit and retain teens despite the potential barriers of boredom, family responsibilities, and spending social time with their friends.

In 2006 the YMCA Youth Institute of Long Beach, California developed a service-learning program to help overcome these barriers which “…uses technology as an integral mechanism for promoting positive youth development and enhancing the academic success and career readiness of low-income, culturally-diverse high school students.” (Coe-Regan & O’Donnell, 2006)

The YMCA Youth Institute research is unique in the fact that it focuses on the mutually supportive benefits of technology and service-learning. It also supports the idea that effective technology learning is more than skill acquisition, but is built into collaborative, authentic projects.

Overall, the study found that service-learning which emphasizes technology not only increases positive youth development, it also retains and sustains the service-learning program. Participants were particularly attracted to learning new technology skills and saw this as increasing the likelihood of being successful in life.

The participants spent the entire year working in teams to develop projects including digital storytelling, graphic design, 3D animation, and how to troubleshoot and use computer networks. Additionally, curriculum was developed to link the project content to school content standards.

Coe-Regan and O’Donnell identified five best practices to implementing a service-learning program that emphasizes technology to enhance positive youth development.

1. Focus on under-served youth. The study found that ‘nesting’ such programs in low-income, diverse communities helped youth connect with a wide range of other cultures as well as helping reduce the ‘digital divide’ that many youths must overcome to be competitive in the 21st Century job market.
2. Use collaborative, project-based techniques to teach technology. The study found that using projects to teach technology not only increased interest, but participants also gained better planning and problem-solving skills than traditional, specific skill acquisition. Youth also gained more confidence by learning from ‘trial and error’ and from working in teams to develop ‘real world’ solutions to problems as they arose.
3. Emphasize the usefulness of technology skills in the workplace/higher education. It was found that many youths are well aware of the expectations teachers and employers have in regards to technology competency. Therefore, participants had an authentic desire to learn about new technology. It was found that the program retention increased due to the youth’s determination to succeed in college and the marketplace by developing their 21st century skills.
4. Stress the importance of service to the community. The study found that 90% of participants found their service learning experience to be positive. Many of the youths continued their service learning beyond the program by participating in internships, volunteering, or helping teachers in their school with technology.
5. Focus on personal growth and development. “The data suggested that this technology program appeared to have the ability to do more than simply influence technology outcomes. Many participants mentioned the technology skills when asked about the overall general knowledge and skills, but the majority of participants talked about other things they learned about themselves and life skills that went beyond technology skills and knowledge. These included: developing leadership skills, making friends, getting along with others, speaking in front of others and voicing their opinions, balancing life and gaining the motivation to continue with their career goals.” (Coe-Regan & O’Donnell, 2006).

Overall, the study found that service-learning which emphasizes technology not only increases positive youth development, it also retains and sustains the service-learning program. Participants were particularly attracted to learning new technology skills and saw this as increasing the likelihood of being successful in life.

Reference: Coe-Regan, JoAnn R, & O’Donnell, Julie. (2006). Best Practices for Integrating Technology and Service Learning in a Youth Development Program. Journal of Evidenced-Based Social Work, 3, 210-220. Retrieved from EBSCO Host Database.

(This synopsis was written by Steven Hicks, Generation YES grants and special projects coordinator.)

Students involved in GenYES and TechYES programs across the country and around the world are providing service to their schools and communities, and this is a great way to show students that they are part of a growing movement of citizens stepping up and working for change.

Accept the 2009 Challenge here!

See what others did during the 2008 Challenge

Through the Challenge, you can:

• Spotlight the value of service-learning to young people, schools, and communities.
• Encourage others to launch service-learning activities
• Build support for service-learning among decision-makers
• Increase recognition of Learn and Serve America, the only federal program dedicated to service-learning

Happy challenging!

Sylvia