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Digital Fluency Intensive 2021 Day Eight

Today we looked at the final Manaiakalani kaupapa word: Empowered. Vicki spoke about how sometimes our students and whānau may not be empowered in areas like housing, money, healthcare etc, so it is really important that our tamariki are empowered when it comes to their education. This ties in closely with issues of equity and accessibility; we want all learners to be empowered, engaged and successful with their learning. Vicki talked about how students beginning school in low decile areas start with a mean academic performance of 3 years, which puts them nearly half a lifetime behind their peers in higher decile schools. This really hit me as a New Entrant teacher, thinking about how we can support students to ‘catch up’ so they can achieve their full potential. Vicki provided us with a quote “The greatest joy comes from empowering students to discover the treasure that lies within them” and then asked us to think about our own quote. Mine is “The greatest joy comes from empowering students to believe in themselves and to be as proud of their learning as we are”.


Our Deep Dive into the Future of Tech was awesome, looking at technologies and jobs that didn’t exist 10 or even 5 years ago. Having a glimpse into what is out there is really good for thinking about how we are equipping and up-skilling our young people for their futures.


I really appreciated the section of the day looking at the Digital Technologies Curriculum. I often find that these are the kinds of things we don’t get time to go through or get support with so it was nice to increase my understanding of the two new areas of the technology curriculum and what resources are out there. The exemplars on TKI are really wonderful and I found an activity I could definitely see myself using or tweaking to use with our kids. It involves a grid and using simple up, down, left and right instructions to get the bee to move around the grid and collect pollen. In our bubble group we spoke about how it is just so important for us as teachers to embrace this part of the curriculum so that we set our students up for success. Really looking forward to exploring how I can integrate these types of activities into what we already do, it's not as hard or as scary as I thought!

For our exploring coding time I looked at making a story using Scratch Jr. Before today I had some experience using Scratch Junior but it was really good putting myself in the learners’ shoes and seeing how it worked and challenging myself to use new features I hadn’t tried before. I drew my own background and then used the block code to make my characters move around and talk to each other. I then used the iPad’s screen recording function (another new thing for me today!) to capture my creation. I can definitely see our learners being able to create or re-tell a story as a follow up from reading time or as part of our writing programme. Really excited to have something I know will excite and engage my junior learners.
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  1. Phil @ Ako HikoSeptember 17, 2021 at 4:17 PM

    Kia ora Aimee. I'm glad you got your Scratch project up. Ka pai! You're so right about needing to catch students up. It always amazed me when I heard how many new words students should be learning every day. And that's true even if they weren't behind at the start of school! The bee activity you mentioned also works well out on the courts with chalk. See you next week!

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