DFI 5- Computational Thinking

Connecting with Manaiakalani

This morning Dorothy is talking about Visible learning. Dorothy talked about how visible learning is something easy that a lot of people over think. Visibility in Manaiakalani is all about the learning being visible for everyone learners, teachers and whanau.

The children who succeed are the ones who can read the teachers mind. This is very important as when our learning is visible all children should be able to read the teachers mind.

Dorothy then talked about Hapara and how it was created for Manaiakalani. Hapara was explicitly created for visible learning about allows us to see what the children are doing but also helps us to show them what we are doing through the share links option. Dorothy also talked about how Fiona Grant coined the phrase "Ready to share" rather than "Finished Miss!"

One thing we need to make sure we do is ensure that digital learning doesn't disempower people and instead we make the learning visible. This is so important when we think about what needs to be private.

Deep Dive/Chalk and Talk

OMG Tech- Zoe and Viv from OMG Tech are here to talk about not only why digital tech is essential for schools but also why our children need them. 

Zoe discussed that globalisation is important for some things but we also need to ensure that we cater what we do for our place. We need to ensure that we have a group of children that are confident enough to speak up. Just because the technology is being created doesn't mean we have to use it in our country.

We then went into the library and did a sorting network. We were able to discuss debugging and how coding works. 

 Zoe then discussed the new digital technologies curriculum and how it works. They supplied us with a one page summary to help us understand the digital tech curriculum. We discussed that when we are talking about computational thinking we are talking about how a computer works.

After that we wrote a set of instructions for a paper plane, we then tests our instructions on someone else and then we had to breakdown our problems (decomposition). We then talked about logical thinking. Using our instructions would a computer be able to make our paper planes? We then did some debugging on the instructions to fix the problem that we have detected.

Levelling Up

We then played with scratch through a student log in so we could explore how we can use this with the children. 

Making meaning of content- Kia Takatū ā-Matihiko

A way for you to self assess where you're at in the digital curriculum. 

Is it important to know how computers work? For this block we are talking about how computers work and binary code. We talked about what the internet and computers are and how they work. Hello Ruby is an amazing site that we can use to start thinking about the concepts of computers in a different way. 

Overall I have learnt a lot today and have been given some great resources to get our digital curriculum journey going at our school. This has also given me an insight into how our children are going to be learning over the next wee while.