Digital Fluency Intensive 8 - Computational thinking

 

Digital Fluency Intensive 8 - Computational thinking

Connecting with Manaiakalani :Empowerment.

In our community whanau have been disempowered by financial hardship.  Their choice's are limited by lack of money and resources.  The average income for an adult in our community is $19,000. This limits their ability to exert power over their life situation for example housing, health, and employment.

Our 5 year olds arrive with the average academic skills of a 3 year old and recent studies also confirm these deficits exist in health and physical attributes as well.

The Manaiakalani kaupapa is designed to to disrupt this reality and give our young people high aspirations for themselves and their futures.  As educators we are able to support this endeavour and can make a difference as evidenced in the writing data from last year -  Covid lockdown did not negatively impact our achievement data because we were able to utilise our students digital connections and competence.

Dorothy challenged us to complete this sentence...

The greatest joy comes from Empowering students to - see themselves as valuable and competent learners

The fitting together of four aspects of Kaupapa - to be truely empowered in the learning journey assisting them to make connections (connections are power), visible and ubiquitous, allowing the power of learning to be driven by whanau and learners.

Connecting with the Digital Technologies Curriculum 

Kerry introduced the digital technologies curriculum to us today and described our role as teachers tis to allow our students to navigate the digital environment in a competent way. 

Teachers aim  to enable learners to choose the correct tech for a desired outcome or to  create

 digital solutions to problems.  The key is allowing students to be innovative creators and designers with technology - not just passive consumers.

Computational thinking - is about the underlying principles of digital technology and this is were my learners are situated.  They will be learning to break down actions into detailed instructions.  In my classroom we use Beebots to enact this.  I found the TKI exemplars really useful for thinking about how to structure these lessons and find the synergies with what I am trying to achieve in my oral literacy focus.  It is a way to extend language in my learners by getting to narrate each action required to build a sequence.

I spend my time today exploring Scratch Jr and creating within this app.  This is an app that would work well with my New Entrant learners and I can see how we could transistion from real world coding. E.g on a grid on the playground to a the app.  It would allow them to work using visuals which would be more suited to their literacy levels and is a nice progression from beebots.

This is my Scratch animation.