Week 30: Contemporary Trend in New Zealand or Internationally
As a Digital Technologies teacher, the trend that is the
most relevant to my practice is the uptake in Coding as Literacy and the
changes the adoption of Digital Technology as a curriculum in England,
Australia and New Zealand schools is making into our classrooms.
I have become aware what the requirements of this curriculum
and the need to develop an understanding of Coding for the past five years through
the increase in opportunities for my students such as #SHE; Code Club; Computer
Science Unplugged.
The drivers of change in the rapid increase in knowledge I
need to adopt in my teaching are Professor Tim Bell and his team at the
University of Canterbury and Associate Professor Peter Andreae and his team at
Victoria University. Their vision of providing the CS4HS (Computer Science for
High Schools) conferences for Digital teachers has allowed us to adopt the new
Digital Technology Curriculum (Hangarau Matihiko) with a relatively smooth
transition. Tim Bell’s vision of the Computer Science Field Guide, is a wealth
of training for teachers to spring board from. The Code Club resources have
also been developed to assist teachers to adapt their practice to assist the
upskilling of their students in Computational Thinking.
The use of digital tools is the pathway that we use to
assist in the presentation of the Digital Curriculum, but my concern is that
educators take shortcuts and don’t understand the work that is required to
develop ‘Computational Thinking’ in students and the focus in learning that is
required to grow a student’s brain. The
Digital Technologies Curriculum is not about how to use the tools but using the
digital tools to assist learning.
Every hour I have with students in front of me is precious.
How can I as a teacher make sure that this time is used in such a way that
students are stretched, and their thirst for learning is never satisfied? As
Bill Gates has said this is ‘an incredible time to be a learner’.
The opportunities I have is to expose our small rural town
students to life outside their door, outside New Zealand. For example, using
Google Glasses with the ‘Expeditions’ phone app or to learn the full power of
Microsoft 365 – the online courses that Microsoft has for the Innovative
Educator allow me to upskill at home and expose my students to fabulous opportunities
the next day.
We are extremely fortunate in our school with the Digital
Technology infrastructure we have. The
sorts of barriers that are preventing this growth of knowledge are: chromebooks
not logging onto the school system every time, students forgetting passwords,
changes in staff, and when we adopt BYOD that students/families will need to
bring a laptop that is, in excess of $500. This may be a bridge too far for
some families.
The changes I will adopt in the next two years will be to
upskill in ‘Computational Thinking’ to support my Year 9 and 10 students. To
budget and purchase a variety of robots and materials for a maker space. Also,
to consider will be, how we can change the physical environment we have to
allow our department the flexibility to develop some kind of MLE (Modern
Learning Environment) as our tables are fixed and allow our students to engage
in more group work rather than the individualised silo learning that is common
practice in our Digital classroom, because of the limitations of our furniture
permanence.
These are some of the most
exciting times in education I have experienced.
References:
Hi Carolyn
ReplyDeleteYour comment regarding BYOD is interesting. We went through the same thoughts when we made that decision a few years ago. Initially many staff had reservations because of that financial barrier and the have vs have not culture that could eventuate from it. With the support of Innes Kennard (providing specialist ipad teacher support) we were able to discuss, think, read articles and come to the general conclusion that the move would be beneficial to all as each one who brought their own device reduced demand on school devices. The plan was to increase the number in each class until there was 1 between 2 at least. It has evolved over the past few years, as we have opened it to all devices not just ipads. Anyway, on reflection it has been a worth while venture, especially with teachers doing Mindlab and using their devices in new ways.