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We are starting a Computer Management course in our school district where the students will basically be doing a tier 1 helpdesk. Does anyone have this type of thing going on at your school? Im looking for ideas as to how to handle these kids’ user rights as well as what they do. Im worried things can get messy by giving the students too many permissions.

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Bumped this thread to the SW Education forum—

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I do something like that in our district. We had only one student last year that did a lot of move stuff in and out of classrooms, cable runs, and any other items that was fairly straightforward and simple. I inherited the program from the previous tech coordinator and ran with it. We had about 6 or 7 in the first year I was there, but 99% of them graduated and there was no effort to recruit.

This year I will end up with four students and will probably work with them one or two nights a week in the school after school is out for the day.

In our case, I evaluate the students through the working with them on what I can and cannot trust them with. We make them sign a “contract” that they will be in contact with potentially sensitive information and that confidentiality is important. They at any time can be dismissed from the program. After we evaluate how much of a level of trust, I then proceed to give out access as necessary. My one student knows all of the administrative passwords for the server, switches, and local admin passwords for desktops. They also have access to the dashboard of our Meraki equipment and can monitor and make changes as needed.

I am starting my third school year in this district and haven’t ran into an issue with this program as of yet. The key is to let the students know that you will watch what they do and any time there is a breach, they are the first ones you will be looking for,

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I would think local admin on PCs, sans the ability to bypass any web filtering you have in place. And delegate management of whatever OU your student accounts live in. That should be a good start.

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Plus, just straight helpdesk access in Spiceworks, of course.

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Some resources, since the trail of a student-run help desk has been blazed before:

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I’m only here because I used to have that Chiodos (the zombie bunny) shirt in blue.

But on subject, evaluate their skills. Only give them access to things you can trust them to work on and not break. Also, make sure the students you hire are trustworthy.

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We had a kind of tech outfit for students in the high school I went to. A lot of the work was tier 1 troubleshooting like a mouse wasn’t working or something. We also were responsible for transporting A/V equipment and the seniors set up a new lab one year. A lot of it was paper jams/refilling paper trays in various copiers, though.

Didn’t have much in the way of individual login privileges, though. We seemed to have a funky deployment where every student shared an account and god knows what for the administration.

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Is this only going to be for school systems or is anyone going to bring their stuff in to be looked at?

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KJOtaku, this is only for the school district. We are 1:1 from 6th grade through 12th and there is only two support specialist staffed, myself included. So we are looking for all the decent help we can get.

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In our school district, there would be a lot of privacy and liability issues with this. We wouldn’t give them any additional permissions.

That said, they could still do a lot. They could log tickets on behalf of others. They could troubleshoot hands-on (e.g. “my monitor is blank”). They could unpack, move equipment, etc.

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My experience with a help desk class was in Tech College and came after I already had passed a CompTia A+ class.

My high school never even came close to a coding class (graduated in 2001) so I’m not sure what kids are up to these days. One may have built a computer from scratch, another might have a mom or dad who is a SysAdmin and knows in inside out of the newest windows server software. Other might know how to log onto face book or snap chat. Like Zwickasaurus said you are probably going to have to figure out what each student can do and go from there.

If you haven’t set up a lab yet make sure its secure with camera and locks, make sure there is some sort of ticketing system for contact info and documentation sharing and a logging system for hardware left in the lab. Other than that its all a matter of what you want them to fix and how they do it.

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Power before signal/Video before boot! A mantra

I must share, it was adapted from my Electronic technician days.

One might also need to mention, ITSM or ITIL to organize the IT structure. Front office, back office, also Internel and external customers.

God speed! wow, to mold the minds, just wow.

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If we give a student a low level administrator account, it’s generally after they have interned with us for at least a quarter, and we like them enough to invite them to work for us during the summer. There we give them the 3rd degree about security and what they can and can’t do with their account.

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rubs hands together YES…YESSSS burn them out early. Then they will major in psychology.

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You should pick one of the kids and bring someone new into the class, and try and honey pot one of them to potentially see how easily persuaded they may be to go rouge. Not to mention it could lead to a pretty good story for the community here on SP! :slight_smile:

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Hey, I got my degree in psychology! Turned out the 6 years I worked tech to pay my bills was worth more than my degree.

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What about using VMs and giving them admin access (if needed for the program) on those VMs? You could create a snapshot that has the configuration laid out the way you want it in case a student does mess it up. All you have to do is roll back to that snapshot. That way you still have control over things while they still have access to everything they would need to learn doing helpdesk.

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This is an absolutely constant argument. I’m told to give student workers more permissions, but I don’t give them more permissions. In the last network, it was much of the deciding factor of my departure. I couldn’t take the poor management any longer. Two years was enough time to see the writing on the wall. Those that remain, will watch it burn. I held a strangle hold on the server permissions, and for good reason. We have had curious students ruin their privileges and work opportunity. Does this mean it is ruined for the other students? Absolutely. They are not classified employees, they are temporary workers. They are kids. It’s fine if they are curious, but be curious in a VM environment, not on a functional network. Too many students have caused a ruckus. It was only the lack of permissions that saved the rest of the network from abuse.

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We tried doing this in our school system, but as a small school system this didn’t work very well. Last year we had one students who was even interested and he had literally zero technology skills. He basically went around restarting computers when teachers couldn’t figure out why 65 open applications might slow down their computers. We also used him as a gopher more often than not. He got things done, but it wasn’t even nearly what we would consider Tier 1.