Today we had a look at the Digital Technology Curriculum. I found the decoded4learners version of the progress outcomes by Raranga Matihiko very helpful as far as breaking down the outcomes in simple terms to relay to learners. The Manaiakalani Cybersmart alignment to the progress outcomes is another handy tool that is easy to follow. Both of these will come in handy at the beginning of 2023 when I introduce Year 4 students to using their chrome books. Looking at both of these resources was reassuring in a sense that some of these things I already do across other curriculum areas and some can be easily added, therefore it’s not potentially a whole lot more work to try and cover if I am able to plan digital learning across the other curriculum areas. I love forward to checking out more of the resources on TKI and other sites provided in the slides.
During the exploring session I had a play with Minecraft as I have a few students who are keen on Minecraft and I really don’t know much about it. It was great to have a chance to explore this and see how this could be a fun and engaging classroom activity. When I have time I will go back and look at some of the other beginner sites for coding.
I like the idea of following scratch tutorials alongside my class so they are all following a structured lesson, rather than too much freedom which could lead to simply playing.
During the create session I joined Phil’s session squeezing pictures into codes as I was keen to look at some options that could be done off-line to teach computational thinking. This was a fun activity where we created codes on google sheets (can be done on paper) for our names. It was fairly easy to follow so is definitely something I could do with students. I also enjoyed the google sheet version of hang man we played – again my class would love this! CS Unplugged looks like a great site for unplugged activities.
Here is a link to my squeezing pictures into codes sheet.