What is an ITAG, who are they and where can I get one?
ITAG is the acronym that will be replacing ITCH (because of the possible negative connotations attached) and stands for Information Technology Action Group. We have taken this program from Brighton Primary School in South Australia and it is the brainchild of their eLearning coordinator David Henty-Smith.
The program aims to put student IT knowledge to use by calling on students to volunteer to be classroom IT helpers. These students should come to the program with an established knowledge of computing and be able to help teachers to set up hardware and software and troubleshoot when things go wrong.
Homeroom teachers have been asked to call for volunteers in homeroom and each homeroom should have an ITAG representative within the next couple of weeks. Due to the different structure in Brookhill, each English teacher has been asked to get an ITAG so their will be about 18 ITAG students spread out throughout the Brookhill School.
What do they do?
If you are having trouble with IT ask the students who the ITAG rep is and see if they can fix it.
If they can, ace!
If they can’t, they can ask if someone else in the classroom can do it.
If they can, ace!
If they can’t, they can call us in the library and we will come and show them how to fix it next time.
I will also be running training sessions for the ITAG students that will cover common IT problems and setting up a forum for them to post and answer their own questions.
Any questions?
If you have any questions or thoughts about the ITAG program or IT in the school, please let me know.
Tim the Librarian 
This sounds like an excellent program. From a time-use standpoint alone, I’m wondering whether running the training programs would be more or less time-consuming than answering calls from teachers throughout the day. At least it would be predictable.
Also, since I’m in a kindergarten to Grade 12 school, I’m wondering about the ages of the children you would be training.
You make a good point and, since we have just started running the program, I don’t really know how time consuming it is all going to be. Hopefully the meetings will be able to prepare students for future issues as well as covering for the whole what each has been experiencing as an individual.
Regarding your second question, we have taken the prgram from a primary school and are intending to run it from Prep up to Year 12.
I’m from Canada and do not understand what age ‘Prep’ refers to. Could you please explain? The children in my school are aged 5 to 18. Children do become proficient in technologies at various ages depending on their interest. Do you plan to focus the meetings specifically on issues that you deal with on a regular basis as requests from teachers?
Prep in Australia is about 5 years old too.
Regarding the meetings, I was going to have separate meetings for the primary (5-11 years old) and secondary (12-18) students. These would deal with current IT issues, like how to set-up a data projector, future tech issues, like we are about to start using X Touch Typing program and students will need such-and-such to log in, and anything that seems to come up again and again (don’t forget to set such and such printer setting before…).
I imagine our younger students will be less capable to begin with but will grow with the role so that, in a few years time, they will be much more of a help (and need less help themselves) than students of the same age now.
So you’re in a similar school situation. I admire you for starting out with the wee ones. I’m thinking on this idea. I like it. Thank you.
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