Laptop Buying Guide 
In this guide, I will attempt to provide a laptop to fit into major budgets for the active student for high school as well as college.  The elements that I considered were processor, memory, storage, screen size, battery life, and build quality. 
As the only Instructional Technology Teacher at Algonquin I get many requests for help.  At this point the requests mostly come to me by email.  I sort through those requests and decide which ones make sense to have the SWAT students involved in.  There are also times that teachers or administrators just stop by with a question or an issue.  If it happens during a period that I have a SWAT student I try to involve them whenever possible.  I always appreciate their input, ideas, and suggestions.  There have also been times when members of the SWAT team have been approached in the hall or contacted individually with requests.  So as you can see people at Algonquin ask for help in a variety of ways.  At some point I would like to move to a more organized ticket system but for now what we are doing seems to work
Hello, world!
I'm super excited to get this blog up and running. SWAT is constantly expanding, and the time seems ripe for us to establish a public online presence where we can share our work and show others what we're about. In this blog, we plan to detail how our club functions, post about our current projects, and provide information on a variety of other technological topics. I hope you find our blog informative and please feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions or comments.
Students at Algonquin have many requirements but also have space for some electives.  S.W.A.T. or Students Working to Advance Technology is considered an elective and students receive 2.5 credits for each semester they are enrolled.  Guidance works out the scheduling for those who have decided to take S.W.A.T. as a class.  They schedule all of their required classes first and then see where there is space for S.W.A.T.  Guidance also looks at my schedule and where I have availability.  This semester I have 3 students enrolled and each of them comes to me one period a day.  At this point I like it that way because my main role at Algonquin is to be available to teachers to help them with classroom technology.  If I had too many student assistants during certain periods a lot my time would be taken up managing them.  We also have an after school club so students who cannot fit SWAT into their regular schedule come to those meetings and help out at other events.
In order for our student tech support team to run effectively it is important to recruit the best students.  I knew that I wanted kids with great interpersonal skills as well as those kids with a strong knowledge base of instructional technology tools.  The members of the student tech support team at Algonquin focus less on repairing hardware issues and more on the integration of classroom technology.  My main role at Algonquin is to coach teachers on the use of Instructional technology so I needed students to help me with that.  So before recruiting students it is important  to think about what the roles of the student tech support team will be.  The next step for me was to talk to the Guidance Department at our school.   At Algonquin Guidance is responsible for the approval and creation of new courses so that was the logical place to start.  We discussed different ways to run the course and in the end decided to run it  the same we do for other student assistants in various departments.  Students take the course as Pass/Fail and are chosen by the teacher.   We may at some point offer the course to all interested students in our Program of Studies, but  for now this system seems to be working.  The guidance counselors have been very helpful in suggesting students that would be good for the class.  As a former math and web design teacher at Algonquin I recruited a couple of my former students.  Now that the program is up and running students are learning about it from other students
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