Digital Fluency Intensive - Session Eight: Computational Thinking & Empowerment

 

Empowered

Creating empowerment is such an important concept to put into practice - people in our communities have felt like they don’t necessarily have the power to influence, and the ability to affect change, and so giving them that power is critical to building communities that control their own success and outcomes (rangatiratanga). 

Power gives you choice - many of our families do not have choices in what happens to them. By providing quality education and opportunities we can give these families the opportunities to get/create jobs which can provide them with an income to give them choices. Choices are powerful.

The Number 3 - Our new-entrance students are performing at the age of 3; not just academically, but socially, medically, and psychologically. Students at high decile schools hear 32 million more words than student’s in low-decile schools. The development of language is so critical for learning, and has to be modelled to our students, because they may not be getting it at home.

Equity; How can we give access to effective teaching, digital equipment and infrastructure to help them overcome difficulties which they have no power over to disadvantaged students?

Computational Thinking

We began the discussion with a game based on block coding where we had to guide a

“robot” through a maze using explicit instructions. This is the foundational learning level

for our students, and in school we have been working with Scratch - a program which allows

students to create their own animations and games where sprites are given instructions to follow.

Being Digitally Fluent in a LCS World

The Manaiakalani Programme aims to…

• Support teachers to acquire digital fluency

• Have teachers learn how digital tech can accelerate achievement

• Support teachers to be confident delivering curriculum in a digital context

Thinking about how we practically apply these skills is critical - this is not just theoretical learning,

there has to be a tangible outcome for our students based on the learning we have done in DFI.

Curriculum Connections

1. Computational Thinking for Digital Technologies

1. Students develop an understanding of comp sci principles; learning programming  so they can become creators

2. Designing and Developing Digital Outcomes

1. Students learn how to design fit-for-purpose digital solutions

Technology Strands

Practice Planning Outcome Outcomes and Evaluations.

Knowledge Modelling Products Systems

Nature of Tech Characteristics of technology Characteristics of outcomes

Starting with teaching students the language necessary for students to comprehend the ideas and concepts they will be learning is critical.

Coding

In our last two sessions we explored different coding tools online - in particular Scratch, which is a program our students at PES are quite familiar with. They have been working on constructing their own Scratch game in their Creative Space time, focused on exploring, and discovering more about our school, and offering visitors the opportunity to learn more about our school.

The tutorials on Scratch are incredibly helpful, and give the students loads of useful tips and tricks for using the different blocks to control, and animate different “sprites'', the objects that can be interacted with, as well as creating their own backgrounds (or they can use their own). The tutorials are pretty critical for the learning process as they provide context to what otherwise might be pretty vague instructions for them to follow.

Scratch is a wonderful tool because it allows students to cover the absolute basics of computational thinking, and instruction giving, but it also allows students who are more confident with it to really push the boundaries, and create immersive, and super interactive games and concepts.

Digital Fluency Intensive - Session Seven: Devices

Ubiquitous

I was not really familiar with this word before engaging with Manaiakalani pedagogy; it means to be present, and found everywhere. It relates to how we connect to our learners, and our communities. It became particularly pertinent to our success when we went into lock down in 2021 and our hybrid learning models during 2022; we should be able to offer our students learning experiences whenever, and wherever and they are, even if we aren’t in the classroom. Removing the barriers of time and place.

We also work to embrace the rewindable learning model which can allow students to control the pace at which they work through their learning; giving students the opportunity to pause, rewind, fast forward through their learning is a valuable tool, and works to give students more ownership of their own learning.

Ubiquitous learning opportunities are increasingly valuable for our students; they do not have the same exposure to language, and literacy as other students, so the more opportunities we give them, through things like the Summer Learning Journey, we see great improvements, and maintenance of the learning they have done.

Cybersmart

Empowering our learners as connected and confident decisions makers in the online space. We talk about Smart, not Safe. The internet should not be seen as a scary place, so by focusing on the positive we empower students to make good decisions when they’re online.

“The new digital citizenship takes students beyond the protective, to the proactive” (Team ISTE, 2017)

By helping students to understand how to learn, create and share in the digital world, in a smart way, we empower them to navigate, share, learn, and create, within it, with confidence. In a digital age it is really important that they understand the permanent nature of the internet, for example, understanding that the things they do online have longevity etc.

Manaiakalani One:One

Through the lens of Partnership, Participation & Protection (Waitangi framework).

Today we focus on…

 Partnership element;

- Ako is a whanau or community experience

- Engagement in the decision making process eg. Kawa of Care

- Engagement through device ownership

- Every learner can participate

- Every teacher can be supported to become Digitally Fluent when all devices are the same

- Equity; all students feel part of the collective by using the same devices

Protection element;

This should all happen behind the scenes

Partnership with Hapara to design Teacher Dashboard to make all digital learning visible

Partnership with N4L and Linewize for filtering the internet so that students don’t need to worry too much about the safety elements of their internet browsing.

Student Devices

Today we worked on the devices our students used, and familiarised ourselves with how to operate the devices. This is incredibly important because a lot of our students may not be fluent with them, and if we don’t know how to use them expertly we are hindering our students ability to explore, and navigate their devices on their own, post-teaching. If we are fluent with these devices we give our students the best opportunities to Learn, Create and Share to their full capability.

We explored both Chromebooks and iPads; I’ve become very familiar with chromebooks as they have been a part of my teaching journey since the beginning, however the iPad activity I found very useful; the se of the Explain Everything app has a wide range of possibilities; it's a great way of recording the interactive processes used in maths for example. This has encouraged me to think of new ways I could use this, particularly when working with maths groups, as we can work on the whiteboard, but also record our process in order to create rewindable learning experiences for our students;

Present problem -> Open EE -> Record whiteboard -> Problem solve w/ students -> Share video with students & post on class site/in slides.

This also applies to Screencastify/Quicktime screen recordings. These are incredibly useful tools for talking our students through instructional sequences and to provide rewindable learning for our students which is guided.

Screencastify has an awesome feature, which is that it allows you to insert questions into the video. These are interactive, and can help me to understand better, which areas of the instructions may have been difficult for them, or ones which they already have a good grasp on. These forms of formative feedback will be invaluable, as they do not require a lot of effort from students, they will engage with them because they are interactive, and the data is collected for me to refer back to, in order to better guide my practice.

Here is a small example of how this works;  

Digital Fluency Intensive - Session Six

 Enabling Access - Sites

Connectivity

Connectivity is one of the most critically important parts of being part of Manaiakalani; the sharing element of the pedagogy is only valuable when it generates, and creates interactions between the audience and the creator.

This kind of connectivity gives the students a great sense of empowerment that they are doing important work, and give them the ability to connect and engage with others around the country and world; I think this could be a great tool to break students out of a “local and personal” mentality, and get them to think , and learn about the wider world around them. This is critically important as students advance through schooling, and fits in nicely with the SOLO taxonomy idea of relationality, and the extended abstract (generating curiosity and making connections about the world around them)

Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu

 was a wonderful experience; making connections between our class, and other classes around the country to create a little community of sharing, and engaging with students from around the country, while also empowering students to be Cybersmart through the leaving of quality blog comments and engaging in online behaviour that elevates thinking, and positive actions.

Teaching Community

Creating a community of learning is also a really valuable tool for teachers, as we strengthen our practices by collaborating, and sharing the ideas which have worked well in our respective school communities allows us to create a robust learning curriculum for our students.

Manaiakalani Pedagogy focuses on building the Learn - Create - Share model by building towards the end goal of combining all of these elements, by taking clear steps to understand how each element works. 

Leading Learning Using Google Sites

Five affordances of Learn Create Share in a digital learning environment;

- Engagement

- Teaching conversations

- Cognitive challenge

- Visibility

- Scaffolding

Google Sites

We use Google sites to empower visible learning

Creates a ‘one stop shop’ for learning that is accessible anywhere, at any time, and gives students access to rewindable.

It allows us to personalise learning via multi-modal and multi-textual learning opportunities.

Creates visible links between planning, and learning; this transparency is important as it allows us to create connections between school home and community.

During uncertain times (covid) we have learning that is readily available, and creates a community for students who may feel disconnected while not at school.

My Site

Our class sites have been created in collaboration with the other teachers in our space to create a consistent theme; and ensure that navigation through the site is easy for students across our team.

As a group we contributed to a discussion document where we looked at and analysed different Learning Sites across the Manaiakalani clusters; some interesting points that bear focusing on;

Sites which are simple, and easy to navigate will create engagement as learning is easy to access and find.

Rewindable content for students to use is critical; offers them the opportunity to revisit and learn at their own pace.

Making sure that the site is up to date with current happenings, and ensuring that out-of-date links and unnecessary clutter gets removed once it is not needed.

Visual elements of the page cannot be understated as it creates engagement if the content LOOKS interesting to the students. This is especially important when we think about our less engaged students.

We took turns evaluating each other's sites; it was really interesting to see how other schools laid out their learning. I was particularly interested, based on my previous teaching experiences, with how this philosophy translated to secondary school level. I can see how critical rewindable learning is, particularly for longer-form assessments where students are required to complete work more independently.

Based on the feedback I was given from my site I have set goals to include more student-selected work options; to try to include more multi-textual options; and a wider choice of tasks to engage my learners to account for a variety of learning styles.

Digital Fluency Intensive - Session Five

Visible Learning

Creating visible learning is a critical part of the Manaiakalani pedagogy; creating transparency between us as teachers, the students, whanau, and the community in order to develop strong partnerships between the school, and learners.

Teaching is a more collaborative process than ever before, and we should be making an effort to include as many relevant parties as we can in the process; by including people we can share the responsibility for learning - a problem shared is a problem halved, so to speak.

"It is our job to get inside the learner's mind. Not the learner's job to get inside ours”

Creating learning opportunities that are effective across our learners lives means we make learning accessible, available, and in advance. Nothing happens by surprise, students are aware of learning intentions, outcomes, and of the tasks they will be working on.

Feeds strongly into the feedback/feedforward elements through the use of comments & sharing on Google, and blogging our work (both students and teachers)

Multimodal Learning

- Priority Goals 

- Engagement

- Personalised Learning

- Accelerated achievement 

- Empowerment

Creating engagement is critical to learning, and so the more personalised, and relevant information is a powerful tool; it is also critical for student’s information literacy, understanding how many different types of texts, and styles of presenting information. By empowering our students with information literacy through a variety of text types, and multimodal learning we give them confidence not only to tackle the work they do in class, but also to become life-long learners who are confident navigating the contemporary world of information.

Our class sites are the first port-of-call for creating an engaging place for our student’s learning; in order to do this we need to be creating multi-modal designs for them to engage with.

We design these sites with the following in mind; 

- Engagement

- Accessibility

- Empowerment and agency (making choices about their learning)

- Cognitive complex 

- Personalisation, and differentiation

- Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

Multimodal Designs used for behavioural engagement & Multi-textural design for cognitive engagement

For me to focus on;

Finding ways to separate tasks into smaller chunks

Offer greater variety of texts, not just variation of activity options

Multi-textual Learning

Along the lines of T-Shaped literacy, multi-textual learning is built around the idea that we don’t teach to text; we teach to theme or a structured set of ideas. By using a variety of texts from multiple perspectives/contexts we give students a wider array of information from which to draw conclusions;

Main text (w/ identified theme)- the focal point of the teaching, and the one which we use as the fundamental gatekey to the learning.

Complementary texts - texts which are similar in idea, theme and/or reading level to support information.

Scaffolded text - a text which is chosen for the purpose of supporting students who are finding reading the main/complementary texts difficult. 

Challenging text - texts which will challenge pre-existing ideas, ideas within the text, or perhaps cognitively challenging by being more in-depth, or a more difficult reading level (which can also require some support and scaffolding for students to read)

Learner selected text- gives students ownership over their learning, and also allows them to exercise their own research skills, and choose texts which are interesting and relevant to their own interests.

“Identifying what is an appropriately challenging text is a very complex undertaking as it is not just determined by quantifiable features such as lexiles, but by multifarious factors including students’ prior knowledge and interest in the topics at hand, their motivation to read, the extent to which the task is purposeful (and they see it as purposeful). We believe that one affordance of text sets, as opposed to single texts, is that the range of texts used increases the likelihood that all students will find at least one text that is challenging and all students will find at least one text that is accessible. Text sets might therefore be seen to spread the risk that one text would be too easy or too hard. Achieving the balance between high and deep, wide and narrow is likewise a very fine balancing act, and what is the appropriate balance is always contingent on the students’ strengths and needs and the purpose and context.” (Wilson and Jesson, 2019)

Google Sites

I've been very familiar with Google Sites over the last 4 years working at PES, but understanding the process of creating one which is multimodal and multi-textual has been an awesome challenge - here is one I created today as an example of what can be accomplished using Google Sites; following the Manaiakalani pedagogy of Learn, Create, Share the site is simple; three learning areas, with a variety of texts, tasks and activities for the students to complete, and to share their learning with their classmates, and the wider community