DFI Session 6 Computational Thinking - Unplugged & Hardwired

Today's little ripper of a session was at Tonui Collab (formally Mindlab). We've had a great day exploring, hands-on, digital technologies.

Our morning kicked off with Dave Winter, the Manaiakalani Programme Outreach Co-ordinator, presenting on the Visible component the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy.  Visible learning through digital affordances opens the door of the classroom and the learner to whanau, professional colleagues and further afield if desired.  It also means that learning is re-windable.  Students can catch up if they've missed something or if they need to revisit learning.  Visibility of learning can be found in class and individual student blogs and through the google sites spaces that teachers set up for learning.  Students can find what they need for learning within a couple of clicks.  They can find exemplars of the learning, instructions, rubrics, information, learning tasks etc... (if the teacher has this set up for them).  Dave also mentioned that the Hapara dashboard has a parent portal.  This is the modern way for parents to 'see their children's books'.  I need to explore this further as it could be useful for strengthening home/school partnerships in our kura.

In terms of improving my confidence and knowledge as a school leader, we delved into the Kia Takatu a- Mathiko (Digital Readiness)  information.  We looked at e-learning / ICT capability versus Digital Technologies.  Here's the difference between the two:

1. Digital Fluency is about understanding how to use technologies
2. Digital Technologies is about learning to be a creator in the digital world, not just learning to use systems.

As I read through the e-learning capabilities with ICTs I thought I'm pretty good with these & they are mostly going well in our school.  The create solutions and learn about digital technologies was a whole other story.  We are really still in just a dabbling stage with so much of this deeper computer science stuff.  It was a bit of a relief to learn that there are some 'unplugged' learning activities that are precursors to computational thinking.  Activities that, from a primary school perspective, would have been in the geometry strand of maths came to the fore - giving instructions (procedural writing in English), using the language of direction etc..  We navigated the movement of a human-robot by having someone write the code & another colleague test the code. Later, we played with good old tangrams.  These are also great for computational thinking.

From the practical 'unplugged' activities we moved into doing similar instruction giving activities (coding) on an ipad app called Lightbot.  This will be good for practicing simple coding.  Later, our Tonui Collab friends brought out 'Makeblock Mbot' robots.  We had a wee play with these by controlling them on the ipad.  

The afternoon session had us playing (creating) on software called COSPACES.  This brings virtual reality and augmented reality.  With a few clicks, we could animate & code creations.  This was lots of fun and I know that our student learners would thoroughly enjoy creating VR on this :)

Next steps, cracking on with how our school plans to implement the digital curriculum.