Nossal High School’s professional development in IT resources and digital pedagogy is centred around our ‘GeekSquad’ Professional Learning Community. This voluntary team has been comprised of between 40-50% of staff since its inception 5 years ago. Participating staff are 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 are 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 are 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 has a significant number of members, this allows us to allow staff to self-select 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 has been instrumental in assisting with the acceptance of change-management practices within the school. They have 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.