Databus Issue: 2010 2 04/30/2010
Teachers as Their Own Best Customer Service Providers
Renee Ramig Director of Technology for Seven Hills School
PDF
In an ideal world, every school would have a help desk with a “real” person available to respond to technology issues. If I am an English teacher and three of the laptops the students are using won’t print, I call the help desk. Someone comes running into my classroom with a red cape and instantly fixes the problem.
As school districts find more ways to cut expenses, often technology support is on the chopping block. Rarely does a school have an on-site help desk that can respond to teacher needs when they really need the support. In reality, usually a centralized support team, or in some cases a single person, does its best to support all the schools in the district. The difficulty is that it is not helpful for the above English teacher to get help three days later. The essays were due that day.
One way to help with this is to give teachers a set of skills and tools they can use to solve their own problems. These skills and tools need to be very easy and quick to use.
The first step to take is to assess what teachers can do with the setup already on the school machines. Are the users local administrators or do they have limited access? Obviously, the skills and tools you give to the teachers need to match the access level they are given.
Start by creating troubleshooting steps for the most common tech issues that teachers can solve based on their access level. Post these on a website. Also, use the “old-fashioned” paper-based method, and distribute these pages to teachers.
Some of the common issues that teachers often need “immediate” help with are printing, sound, and connectivity. Focus on these three areas first unless you have site specific issues that are more critical to address.
Create simple how-to sheets. Include lots of screen shots on what things should look like. For example, take screen shots of what an Ethernet cable looks like along with the ports in the computer and wall where it plugs in. Don’t just say, “Make sure the Ethernet cable is firmly connected at both ends.”
Another example is to take a picture of the port the speakers get plugged into, and then actually show a picture of the speakers plugged in. Don’t just say, "Make sure the speakers are plugged into the correct port." Many teachers don’t know what a port is, let alone which one is the correct one.
Be as focused as possible when creating troubleshooting steps. Teachers often do not understand the difference between hardware and software, printing issues, and connectivity. So, make sure troubleshooting steps really spell out with both words and pictures what the teachers are working with.
Create troubleshooting documents to solve problems. Having a document called "Connectivity Problems" will almost never be accessed by teachers. Having one called “Problems Connecting to the Internet” will be very popular.
Two of the biggest obstacles to helping teachers become their own best customer service providers are teacher buy-in and locked-down computers. Two things can help with teacher buy-in: administrative support and a core group of teachers working with the IT team. Administrative support will help encourage teachers to use the troubleshooting strategies when they have problems. A core teacher team helps to ensure the “techie terms” are taken out or clearly explained. These teachers can be models for how others can become their own best customer service providers. Ideally, this core group of teachers should be a non-techie group. If the only people working on this are “techies,” the process then takes longer. When possible, get teachers involved that have the most tech problems in the school. They will be motivated, and they will most likely be some of the least techie teachers.
The second obstacle is often more difficult to deal with. The IT team often wants to lock down computers as much as possible to reduce problems. The problem with this is that it limits what a teacher can do to solve their own problems. If the IT team and the non-techie teachers can meet together and really talk, the teachers can let the IT team know what they want to be able to solve on their own. The IT team could work on changing the way computers and the network are set up to allow more teacher control. This means the IT team has to relinquish some control to teachers and that can be difficult. However, if the bottom line goal is increased student learning and if giving teachers more control can improve this, then it makes sense to move in this direction.
