As all good things must do, our journey through DFI has come to an end.
It has been an awesome experience, learning, creating, and sharing with our fellow teachers, just like our students do, and really drives home the importance of continuing to develop our own learning programs to reflect the changing world around us.
It can be so easy to fall back on traditional methodology, and pedagogy, however the course has challenged us to reflect on those things, and to ask ourselves "How are we, as teachers, readying our students for learning in a digital world?" "How can we create adaptable, and resilient learners?" "How can we teach our students to navigate the vast digital world around them in intelligent ways?"
Over the last 10 weeks we have covered a multitude of different ideas, and learning areas, from basic elements like how to use Docs, Sheets, and Drawings, to more advanced coding mechanics, computational thinking, multimodal, and multi-textual learning experiences. All of these things work together to create a community of learners and teachers who are well-rounded, self-driven, and motivated to learn more, because they know the best ways to do it.
It is easy for us as teachers to reflect on what we already do, and fit our current teaching into these frameworks, and say "DONE!", but if we are truly going to prepare ourselves, and our students for the technological changes that happen in the future, we must be ready to reevaluate what it means to learn, create, and share in this new digital landscape, and adjust our practices accordingly.
We are no longer the gatekeepers on knowledge, as our teachers were, where what the said was the gospel truth, and only later in life did we unlearn some of the misinterpretations, or misunderstandings they may have had... looking at you, I before E except after C...; instead our job as teachers is more of a pastoral role, a shepherd, who guides and helps navigate their students through the masses of information they now have at their fingertips, to differentiate the reliable, the credible, and the usefulness of their experiences. Who gives them the awareness to understand how they present themselves online, and create an image of themselves in the digital world.
We no longer talk about "safe" we talk about "smart", empowering our students instead of frightening them. By giving them ownership, and agency over what they learn, create, and share online we help them to develop good practices that allow them to thrive in the digital space, and to share their experiences with others, so that they might do the same.
I want to thank our facilitators; Dorothy, Matt, Naomi, and Vicki who have shown great patience, and wisdom in helping us over the last 10 weeks, I can't wait to put everything you've taught us into practice, one step at a time.
