Seventy-one schools in Kansas are participating in a positive school reform model to infuse technology into classrooms across the state, and that model is Generation www.Y.

What is Generation www.Y? Gen Y is a school reform model for developing technology-savvy students who work collaboratively with partner teachers to create curriculum based, technology-infused projects and lesson plans.

In Kansas, TLCF (Technology Leadership Challenge Funds) are used by many school districts to adopt this innovative plan and help their teachers learn technology by taking advantage of one of the previously most unused resources in the school – the students.

Generation www.Y consciously focuses on using students as partners and leaders in bringing technology into the classroom, helping teachers who have not grown up with the technology but want to learn. Students participate in the program by signing up for a Generation www.Y class. The instructor of this class helps the students develop not only their technology skills, but also leadership, presentation, and people skills, and partners the students with an interested teacher in the school for the development of a Generation www.Y project for technology integration.

In the creation of a Generation www.Y project, the student and teacher are partnered in a collaboration where the student brings his/her knowledge of technology to the table, while the teacher brings his/her knowledge of the curriculum and pedagogy. The team together decides what technology could contribute to a specific lesson or group of lessons, and the student, in collaboration with the teacher, designs the technology part of the lesson and teaches the teacher how it is done and how to use it, sometimes even taking part in the presentation to a class.

The TAKE (Technology Assistance to Kansas Educators) Team of the Kansas State Department of Education is proud to be a major supporter of the Generation www.Y program in Kansas. Over the past four years, seventy-one schools have partnered with TAKE to leverage TLCF funds to participate in Generation www.Y. These schools are taking an active role in helping to fulfill TAKE’s mission:

Making a visible difference in learning through the invisible POWER of technology, by Connecting, Collaborating and Communicating to transform information into knowledge.

For more information, go to these URLs:

Generation www.Y: http://207.225.234.197/genwwwy/

Kansas State Department of Education TAKE Team: www.taken.org

Or contact: Linda Loder, Educational Technology Consultant
TAKE Team, Kansas State Department of Education
785.269.7922