Session 6 - Digital Fluency Intensive

We met at Tōnui Collab today for our session which I was excited about, having never been there before.  I was very impressed with the wide open spaces, use of colour and of course the amazing view out of the windows!

We started off the day with Dave Winter, looking at learning being Visible.  This has definitely been a focus for Lynne and I this year with our Class Google Site.  We created it with visibility in mind so that when children have been away or want to access learning to work on at home, it is all on our site so they are able to do so.  It was nice that Dave acknowledged our site for this, thanks Dave.  It makes things so much easier for the learners too as it's all in the one place and it can't get lost or thrown out!

Then it was over to the team at Tōnui Collab for an introduction to the future of technology and what it means for our tamariki.  We watched a clip about the 'Superhero Arm', which highlighted for me how important technology and digital technology is when you see what advancements something like a robotic arm has made.  We then looked at the digital technologies curriculum and structure and I worked with Perky and Cathy to discuss how are we using the Digital Technology Curriculum.  We concluded that we are pretty proficient with the orange areas, but are fairly new on our journey in the blue.

Next was a fun Kahoot using questions from The Mind Lab’s Digital Fluency Playing Cards, which were designed to help integrate digital technologies into the New Zealand curriculum in a fun and engaging way.  Well done to Perky who came out tops, winning a set of these cards and a smartphone microscope converter - I didn't even know there was such a thing!

We watched the peanut butter and jelly sandwich video, which was an introduction into coding.  We have used this video with our learners to highlight the importance of specific instructions!  I teamed up with Perky and Cathy again for our next challenge which was to make a code for a person who couldn't see to navigate from their number on one side to their number on the other without squashing any dinosaurs!  I was the coder - this was tricky, as you had to think about specific instructions and estimate variables like the size of the step taken.  Cathy was the reader of the code and Perky attempted to cross the dinosaur infested path!  After a couple of unsuccessful attempts and some 'debugging', Perky made it!

I really enjoyed my little play on Lightbot and I think this would be a great introduction to coding for my Year 4's.  And then our next challenge was getting into a group and solving tangrams!  NOT as easy as it looks, I'd like to do some of these with our learners too, maybe onscreen and physically.  It was cool to pop on the Virtual Reality googles and have a go with M-Bots too!

Last but not least - Cospaces!  I really enjoyed creating and animating characters with Briar using coding and think this could be the next step for our Year 5 and 6 learners who are using Scratch at the moment.

I really enjoyed my day at Tōnui Collab, I hope to be back someday.