Week 8 - Digital Technologies Curriculum

 

Week 8 - Digital Technologies Curriculum

Computational Thinking sounds like a very high falutin title doesn't it!   Week 8 for the Digital Fluency Initiative (D.F.I) was a deep dive into the 'new' Digital Technologies curriculum.  Which brings me to my first point... when is this not 'new'?  How many years do we say this is 'new' before we consider this to be an expectation for 'normal practice'.  Secondly, when you go through many of the achievement objectives of the 'new' curriculum, many of us 'old timers' would say... oh -  it's just that with a new title :-)  Not so scary after all. 

Dorothy, always gives us plenty of food for thought in her sessions.  Today's Connecting with Manaiakalani Pedagogy" was a look into 'Empowerment'. Increasingly, I understand and appreciate the power of language with not only the New Windsor staff but also across a community.  Language gives us the words and ways to share our thoughts and ideas, desires and wishes.  Language becomes more powerful when understood by a wider community that those just closest to you.  Power grows when you can communicate for more reasons to more people.  Simple ideas ar ethe best - always.  The more powerful your language, the more independent you become, and the more you contribute to the community.  It was good to discuss the language choice of 'Empowerment' over 'Agency'.  I've used 'agency' many times in my vernacular over the last couple of years and it gave me pause to think about educational jargon and also the rationale on why Manaiakalani had opted for the later. 

I also had some deep reflection on the statistic of the average income in a Decile 1 community - $19,000 per annum.  When you take a second to really think of what that looks like for a family and the choices (sacrifices) that a whanau would need to make to survive on that you get a real sense of the daily struggle.  Dorothy was so correct when she said - how clever are those families to live on that!  Absolutely - making that dollar stretch across all the needs of a family would involve incredible creativity, resilience, and fortitude.   In addition, I have a renewed passion for the importance of equity and removing barriers!

I loved the Future of Tech session - I am a total Sci Fi geek and I get excited at the prospect of the future.  I remember being completely blown away by the film the Minority Report when it first hits our screens and I consider myself to be one of the early adopters to any new tech going!  I love the latest gadget and I'm usually at the front of the line for any new releases.  Driverless cars can't come fast enough for me.  I do understand the displacement of jobs and industry but I am aspirational  and optimistic that humans are clever and we MUST evolve and adapt.  I for one am not scared of change.  

Arghhh the angst of the Moral Machine activity.  Can I just let you know Dorothy, Jeremy/Jacob this raised some very contentious dinner conversation on Saturday night.  Choosing between whether the dog or cat would live....  wow - the volume got loud :-) No spoilers on the rest of my decisions!  By the way....I would choose the dog! I also realised I'm one of those annoying people that simply can't make a straightforward decision. I was looking for loopholes in every scenario, so that I would not need to commit to a decision and how I could give everyone a chance to survive (face palm).  

Check it out and see what I mean... link

Thank you for your ongoing patience with supporting us towards the Google Accreditation process in Week 9.  On Friday night I started one of the tutorials and I am going to dedicate some time over the next couple of days to prepare for both the 'Classroom' and 'Sheets' component of the exam.  

So... I'm wondering did Austin go back to Pt England talk about the teachers that he taught Scratch to?  After a short demo and trial using Scratch I had an appreciation of how invested Austin was in the games he had developed and the level of sophistication in his coding - mind blown!

Roll on Week 9... I'll be sad when D.F.I is over!  I'm also well into the flow of my weekly Blog post now and like everything it's a discipline that you work on with practice!  Now to keep it up.