Help...

Help...
A good portion of my weekly hours are spent responding to help requests from the teachers and students in my building. Nothing will stop the momentum of your One to One movement faster than equipment and software that isn't working when the user needs it to work. The key to my sanity is a helpdesk system that allows me to monitor requests, assign the right person to handle the request and track the completion of the request.

Our district has decided to use School Dudes IT Direct as our technology help desk. This will take care of the hardware and software help side of the One to One system but it has some gaps. School Dudes will be used by the teachers to put in a help request for hardware repair or a software problem. Student netbook users will go to our Library circulation desk to submit a help request to School Dudes through one of our library technicians. All requests will be routed to our lead library technician who will then address the request or delegate it to me or the district technology supervisor.

Let me back track for a moment. In our initial discussions on how to manage loaner equipment, repair requests and power/battery issues, we decided to utilize our library staff and existing "checkout" systems rather than trying to put a new system in place. Students are already used to going to the library circulation desk to check out materials and sign up for activities. Our existing bar coding software can be utilized to track loaner batteries, power cords and netbooks in the same way that we track library materials that have been signed out or are overdue. Our library/media center is also a central location where students feel comfortable coming to do research and work with lab technology.


The drawback of the School Dudes system is that it is only going to be handling the hardware/software requests. It also requires a password and user name to access the request page. I still needed a system to track help requests for integration support, our online gradebook system and Google Apps. I decided to use Google Forms for this. Google Forms is a component of Google Docs. This app allows you to generate a survey style form that can be published on the web and linked to, in this case, the district homepage. Users do not need a login or password so parents can easily access this form. A Google Form has two faces. Its public face can be designed as a series of easy to fill in text boxes, checklists or multiple choice responses. Its private face is an excel spreadsheet that allows the creator to organize and sort information in a variety of ways and present that data in a graphic format when necessary.

Keeping good records and responding quickly to help requests will help make your program successful and encourage your users to try new ways of integrating their technology into their classroom experience.

Guiding Questions for Creating A Help Desk

• What is the available budget for this component of the initiative?
  
• What are the specific areas that users will need support on that we would want to include in the help desk?
• Who will make the initial decisions about which path a help request should follow?
• How will the staff access the help desk?
• How will the students access the help desk?
• What technology staff training will be necessary?
• How will that training be done?
• What end user training will be necessary?
• How will that training be done?
• What usable data might be obtained from the help desk?
  ( breakage patterns, persistent software or network issues, training needs)
• Who will be responsible for looking for these patterns and addressing them?
• What would be considered an acceptable turn around time for a request?
• Who will be making sure that the tech staff is being accountable for addressing requests in this time frame?