“When I'm thinking about rolling out new software, I usually start with the students in my club,” Winnick shares. “We try it together and see what we think, and I learn a lot from them.”
When students in her digital wellness club tested gaming software last year, they noted their preference for a “try again” button so they could improve their score in one particular game. They also provided feedback on whether certain games had addictive qualities.
Winnick also collects student feedback during lunch with students and while walking the school halls with them.
“The farther removed you are from the students, the less connected you are to understanding how your decisions impact them,” she says.
Winnick shares some key areas where incorporating student voices can help with IT procurement.
Piloting Device Purchases With Students and Staff
When the Pocantico Hills district tests evaluation units for new laptops, Winnick’s team not only checks to make sure they work well in the school’s environment and on the network, but they also ensure that faculty and students evaluate them too.
“We'll bring a problem up, and we talk through and evaluate it together, so they get to understand a design thinking process, a computational thinking process, and they can apply that to the way that they help us evaluate tools,” Winnick says.
Because they’re using the devices in school every day, students provide feedback on things Winnick’s team might not have noticed. They note the laptops’ weight and how easy they are to carry around. They also comment on speaker volume, display size and how well the touch screen works. They also share whether they prefer a matte or glossy screen as well as the number of ports they need.
“You don't know until you put it in the hands of your power users and have them push it to the limits what kind of feedback you’ll get back,” Winnick says.
READ MORE: Discover how to run a successful ed tech pilot program.
The same principle also applies to other classroom devices. Winnick recently asked students for feedback on headphone options, and the overwhelming winner was over-the-ear headsets.
“It’s just helpful to order a couple, have students try them out and make a decision based on their needs,” Winnick says.
Besides their own laptops, Winnick says the other school purchase that impacts students the most is the board at the front of the room.
“I think if you have a tight budget, the most important thing is to focus on the tools that are used the most,” Winnick says.
During a replenishment cycle, Pocantico Hills upgraded its interactive displays, and Winnick incorporated feedback from users throughout the schools. A key preference for both students and faculty was incorporating touch capability as well as wireless projection from laptops to the interactive boards.
Bringing Students to Ed Tech Conferences
Winnick regularly brings students to conferences to get their feedback on new technology. Students share ideas of where new technology at conferences can be added. For example, robotics technology can be integrated into a science club, while drones might make sense for a career and technical education program.
Students enjoy the showroom floors, according to Winnick.
“It’s like trick or treating for them, but better,” she says. “They want to go to every vendor booth. They want to ask them, ‘What do you sell? What do you do?’”
Getting students excited about educational technology is just the start: For some, these events could be planting the seed for a career in IT.
Building Relationships With Students
Above all, the relationships that IT leaders build with students are helpful when making purchasing decisions, Winnick says.
“The reason my students give me the feedback they do is because of the relationships we've built throughout the years,” Winnick says. “They know that their voices matter.”
Those relationships can surface blind spots Winnick didn’t know she was missing. Although students sometimes keep the same machine from one grade to another, that’s not always the case. She has received direct messages on Microsoft Teams or emails from students sharing feedback on defects such as scratches or chipped screens that appear on a laptop compared with one they had the previous year.
“I thought we were giving every student their same laptop, and so it helps me really understand the decisions, the workflows that are happening within my department that I might not have been aware of,” Winnick says. She can use that information to make adjustments, work out kinks and formalize processes.
From purchasing decisions to workflow feedback, students’ voices are essential to the work of school IT departments. In the end, Winnick says, “that's who my customers are — teachers and students — and we need to make sure they have the tools they need to be successful, and that they're happy and excited about the tools as well.”
