Manaiakalani Session Eight: Computational Thinking

Equity and Empowerment

Poverty creates horrendous disempowerment. This disempowerment destroys people and their lives. What's the way to get out of this? Education.

For me, the greatest joy in education comes from empowering students to believe in themselves by giving the tools to be successful. 

As an English teacher, this means showing kids some tips and tricks that change up their ability to read, quickly. It also means not 'dumbing down' but instead amping up the supports so that they can be successful with the same sorts of texts as their peers.

Technology enables me to do this. Through technology, I can be teaching, reteaching, commenting, testing and feedback to kids all at the same time.

Digital Technologies Curriculum - Hangarau Matihiko

An important idea coming out of the DT Curriculum is how can I use technology by design and how can I teach kids the theory of how technology works and use that knowledge to solve problems?

A key idea of the DT Curriculum is that "It's important that students have opportunities to be innovative designers and creators of digital solutions – moving beyond solely being users and consumers of digital technologies."

This empowers kids by:

• being able to decide when and why to use a specific technology for  a specific task / solve problems for effective teaching, planning, assessment and professional learning and to impact on and create accelerated learning outcomes
• creating a digitally capable person can create their oven digital technologies solution 
•  enabling them to create innovation

BUT! A really big key challenge for me in dealing with the Digi Technology is the vocab; it's like reading Dutch .... except I know one word in Dutch...

For example, algorithm. This word is bandied about but what on earth does it mean? In a Google search, it means, set of instructions for the computer to follow. So, now I understand why my own 8 year old in a Year 4 Manaiakalani class is doing so much instructional writing.

So referring back to the vocab is really important and these key slides are useful to help this. And I really like this student-ified explanation, even as a teacher.

But, I had a play with the MIT app inventor and developed a very basic text to speech app. It was really good fun. The coding is hidden behind the computer puzzle blocks so pretty simple to do. I think the next challenge is to keep building up competency with the inventor simply by playing around to find out what is possible. Then try to develop an NCEA credit counting app that tells kids they're awesome and jiggles them along - a creative project for the Christmas holidays!