GeekSquad

Nossal High School’s move to MS Teams involved creating a professional development Team dedicated to coaching and pioneering ICT development within the school. We called this our ‘GeekSquad’. This voluntary team was been comprised of around 40% of staff  and participating staff were provided with the latest technology purchases within the school in return for agreeing to meeting fortnightly and pioneering the application of all new digital initiatives and innovative pedagogical practices around technology.

Meetings were structured around sharing new ideas, collaboration and exploration of digital tools. An example of the meeting structure and template for the agenda is as follows:

Starter Activity 

• “Favouriting” in Teams is now gone. “Follow” will soon… follow.
• Teams Feed
  • Change your feed to “My Activity” in order to see your chronicled input to Teams
• Wakelet integration with OneNote
  • Worth giving it a shot

Feedback

Up to 10 minutes – a round table of members sharing what has worked for them best over the last 2 weeks and what could have gone better.

Do you have a challenge that the group can solve?

Activities 

• Preparation for Synchronous full school Digital Delivery Day on the 22nd May,  
  Asynchronous for 9s and 10s on the 12 June
• Full software test and intro session during L3 Friday 10th,  
  & L3 Tuesday 14th (SACs excluded of course)
• Yr 11 classes TBA
• Notes on handout: Add application sharing/red border, remove meeting notes

Personal Action Planning 

What are you going to try for the first time in the next fortnight and how are you going to prepare for it?

The GeekSquad members were always the first members of the school to be ‘upskilled’ in changes to software and the implementation of new digital tools within the school environment. As GeekSquad had a significant number of members, it allowed us to provide the remaining staff with a self-selection process into whole school professional development sessions led by GeekSquad members when we are ready to begin deploying new digital tools and associated pedagogical practice.

The work of GeekSquad members was been instrumental in assisting with the acceptance of change-management practices within the school. They played an essential role in coordinating professional learning among staff who are at various stages of development in their understanding of various online systems and tools, such as MS Teams.

GeekSquad has since been disbanded and replaced with a dedicated team who works with AI in the college looking at pedagogical and administrative uses. They are now working in a similar structure to GeekSquad and will be responsible for providing differentiated PL for the staff from 2024 onwards.