Week 8 Computational Thinking

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Thinking about empowering teachers as well as learners is top of my list right now. Taking what I am learning and sharing with my team is something I am trying to find the time to do - not always successfully. Even today's short session on the new technologies curriculum has given me so much to think about. With our new entrants, we are using this all the time without even realising it!

It is something that we need to take a long look at to make sure that we are confident delivering to our learners. The link to the Raranga Matihika resource is definitely something I will be sharing to give them the confidence that we are covering a large amount already and that with some additional tasks around binary and very basic coding the children will love this!



Progress outcome 1 can be as simple as children following instructions to cross the road and then giving the instructions to others, debugging them and finding any errors and making changes. 

I think the computational thinking side of things is easier for me to understand with the age group I am teaching at the moment. Designing Digital outcomes is something that will take more planning to become something that we do to share our learning and this will admittedly be easier with more available devices.

Asking the children to share what they have learned using Explain Everything or by creating a google drawing is probably the first step to get my team on board with - I know the children will love this.


On another note the moral machine activity was really thought-provoking and scary - how can we actually make these decisions?? Who to allow to survive if a self-driving car has to make a manoeuvre that will result in someone dying or being seriously injured! A really scary thought.

The introduction to coding was good to be able to have a look again at scratch but also the Minecraft coding for the chrome book.  We have scratch junior on the ipads and I would like to make this a regular part of the teaching and learning programme next rem. There are so many applications across the curriculum and beginning the journey of acquiring this common technology language has to start somewhere.



I went to the Scratch group which was really interesting and I created several blocks of code - unfortunately, it kept signing me out and neither of the projects were able to be saved - super frustrating - but I wasn't the only one to have these problems. Anyway, we learned how to get our sprites to move and talk which I can see would be very engaging for the children and also fulfilling many of the computational thinking learning objectives too. 


I have signed up for the Google Level 2 Educator exam next week too.

Comments

  1. Latham MartinSeptember 18, 2020 at 1:31 PM

    Kia ora Rachael,

    Thank you for your insightful reflections on Week 8! I am really impressed with the depth of your thinking and the connections you make between your new learning, your existing learning and your wonderings. As am looking forward to hearing in the future how you get on with sharing some of these ideas with your team, and encouraging them to learn, create and share with computational thinking and the digital technologies curriculum.

    Keep up the great blogging!

    Latham

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mrs Rachael HeffermanSeptember 18, 2020 at 2:09 PM

    Thanks Latham - all your calm, good humoured support has been invaluable!

    ReplyDelete

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