The Manaiakalanin connect session was focused around the kuapapa, empowered. Interestingly I have always associated this with learners however Dorothy made it clear that this empowerment also applies to educators. A great example of this is the empowerment that comes from participating in these DFIs!
The word empowered was chosen over the perhaps more trendy term agency due to the possible misconceptions of what this word means in this context. The word agency can have a negative connotation with things such as Oranga Tamariki or Housing New Zealand and thought of as agencies that take over control.
Sadly Dorothy was able to give us many examples of how some of the families in the Manaiakalani cluster were not empowered and the disadvantages that this causes. These include:
- Low income due to things such as families on benefits or those on low wages - the working poor as Nigal Latta calls it
- Poor standard of housing
- Lack of means to improve living conditions, such as rubbish disposal
- Targeting by Loan Sharks
- Restrictions on Health Care
- Research shows that children in Decile 1 communities enter school with an average academic age of 3
- The same children have heard 32 million less spoken words than those in Decile 10 communities
- The transient nature of their community
Unfortunately, Dorothy's technology started playing up and she was unable to finish the presentation but I found it really interesting.
The next part of the day was a refresher for me on the updated Digital Technology Curriculum. Thanks to being apart of Manaiakalani Outreach I have felt confident in our preparedness to implement this especially in the area of Designing and developing digital outcomes.
If the Digital Technolgy Curriculum is implemented to a high standard this will prepare our students for unprecedented change thus being the ability to learn and relearn as change occurs. This session also gave many links to explore in regards to successful implementation and I would like to explore these further for not only my own teaching but also from a school management perspective.
The rest of the day was spent exploring a variety of coding and computational thinking tools. I briefly looked at the site 'Lightbot' which was a very simple game in which you give directions to a figurine along a set of blocks with the game to light up certain squares. I thought this would be a really fun way to introduce the children to giving directions after completing some basic unplugged activities.
I then moved on to explore code.org and looked at 'an hour of code with Minecraft'. Once again, I thought this would be really appealing to my students
The rest of the day was spent exploring a variety of coding and computational thinking tools. I briefly looked at the site 'Lightbot' which was a very simple game in which you give directions to a figurine along a set of blocks with the game to light up certain squares. I thought this would be a really fun way to introduce the children to giving directions after completing some basic unplugged activities.
Finally, I spent some time creating code using 'Scratch'. I have had some experience with this site before and it was great to have time to refamiliarise myself and learn a few hints and tips from Kerry. Kerry also gave several examples of how 'Scratch' could be used as a creative tool for my students to share their learning. Below is my very short example of how 'Scratch' could be used as part of a Cybersmart lesson.
Next term I am looking forward to exploring some of these coding and computational thinking tools with my students who I believe will be very engaged.
Kia ora Kate, I really enjoyed your post and once again it reinforced the value of our Manaiakalani relationship. I am so pleased you made the empowerment connection to teachers, we often just focus on empowering our learners, which is important, however, just as importantly, this also applies to the 'big people'. Let's talk about DT also!
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