DFI Week 8- He Mātai Whakamuri

This morning we talked about students being Empowered in their learning. During this korero, I realised how lucky my students and I are to have one-to-one devices. Half of my hub have their own devices and the other half use classroom chromebooks. It makes it so much easier for them to use a digital device if they are not having to share like students had to in my first year of teaching. A big part of my classroom culture is empowering my students. Many of them come into intermediate believing they have no strengths. Using digital devices enables the students to recognise their strengths. Especially if they are considered an 'expert' in a particular field. Working online also means my students can easily work at their own levels across the curriculum. In most scenarios, the students are not aware of what level everyone is working at so there is little to no discrimination there. 

I am currently wondering about what I can do in my classroom programme to help my students with their digital technology journey. It's difficult to do this myself as I am not very comfortable with digital aspects. I can use basic google apps for example but not so much with the coding and creative aspect of things. I also want to work on incorporating the technology project-based process into our learning as well. Using scratch will be a great start and I can definitely learn alongside my students. Today was a great opportunity to test out my own skills on scratch and other coding websites. 

At the moment we are preparing our students for the ever-changing digital world. There will be many different digital careers in the future and hopefully, our students will be prepared for that. My students are currently learning about creating online content and having a safe online presence. It will interesting to see how we can incorporate more coding and other creative aspects into our programme. We have done a little bit of mahi in our hub around Gamefroot. Some students loved using this platform but others were understandably confused and got frustrated. I am going to trial using Scratch in our hub to see if this will help their understanding of coding. This is turn should help with using Gamefroot. Below is a task that we did with Kerry in which we had to rearrange her code. I can see how I could use this to set my students up for scratch. They can learn how to create code with pieces that are already there. This will also be setting my students up for success as they won't have to try and reinvent the wheel. 

The greatest joy comes from empowering students to believe in their own abilities.