Deep Dive

Today’s deep dive really triggered my thinking about where technology is heading and how far we come in the past 10 years. It is so important that we as kaiako are constantly growing our understanding of current technology and implementing this in our practices. This insures that tamariki are exposed to the changes and are learning about how to incorporate it into everyday life by understanding the functionalities.

Exploring

Throughout the day we explored many different avenues for teaching Computational Thinking. Hello Ruby was one that really stood out for me. I will be investigating this more over the school holidays and hopefully using it in the new school year. Hello Ruby a resource where tamariki learn about computers, technology and programming. There are three books and online there are videos and resources.

Another great platform is Raranga Matahiko. There are some great videos on this site that can be included in kaupapa as a rewindable learn task. I will also be looking deeper into this over the holidays.

Create

Our create task today was to code a waka in Scratch and create a background for the waka. By clicking on the parts of the waka you will hear the ingoa of that specific part. The background was created in GoogleDraw by using shapes and clipart from GreenGrubsGarden.

This method of Scratch will be a great way for tamariki to show what they know in literacy by segmenting and blending sprites.

Scratch

Today’s kaupapa focused on Empowerment. There are many factors that affect the level of empowerment people experience. Manaiakalani believes that through the use of devices and access to online learning we are empowering learners. The four overriding concepts of Empowered, Connected, Visible and Ubiquitous were described as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that when fitted together enhance learning.

Today was very fun. As well as learning about the new Digital Technologies curriculum, we also had the opportunity to learn some basic coding. I enjoyed the Minecraft activity, as well as the dance party which I created using http://studio.code.org, which was awesome fun.

As I went through some of the examples in the slides I was trying to think of ways to teach coding, games and for the students to learn themselves so for example they could learn human anatomy, they would have to make an animation with the figure showing how that bone/muscle moves when they click on it and also comes up with the name of the bone/muscle. Or things like some students, that aren’t too keen on PE but play lots of military games on PC/Xbox/Playstation can now participate fully in games like Dodgeball and/or other invasion-type games we play and experience success which they do not get to experience a lot with conventional sports and games in PE at our school. So they could create games and scenarios to make strategies for the games.

EMPOWERMENT=CHOICES!
Dorothy spoke about how daunting it was for educators when Manaiakalani was first intorduced and the digital tech into schools. The thoughts of having no job, having eveyrthing done and prepared there already. I had the exact same thoughts but I 100% feel empowered by DFI. Its about building and equipping our young learners but also building and equiping our educators too.

5+ a day. How cool was this exercise! and its something I do in my class however, not with all of my learners. Having that conversation ping pong style going back and forth at least 5 times. Encouraging our learners to respond and participate other than shrug, nod their head or grunt. I feel this is important and powerful for our Rangatahi especially at my school where our students are so engrossed in their phones, in their drama but forget that there are actually adults who do care.

Quote from a principal: Marie Mitchell: Disciver the treasure that lies within them.
I feel if we are not doing this as educators, we need to reset or find another job.

Our exploring task and creating task were super fun today! looking at all the coding activities that I know my students have looked at in Digital tech was fun to have a tutu. Pre thoughts today when I heard coding. NO THANKS! after today cant wait to go through some of these activities with my class next year.
I looked at Coding with Mine craft, Bee bots, Toxicode and flappy bird. Toxicode would be an amazing follow up task of instructional writing showing the importance of breaking those instructions up and what happens when you misread or forget one.

Creating task I looked at Dance party with Aimee TOTAL CARNAGE! so fun and very easy to follow through with small groups.

TAKE A LOOK