DFI Eight empowerment, computational thinking, coding and DDDO

From last week:

What has worked: I use Google Keep like, ALL the time now instead of a paper diary (RIP, I do not think I'm going to use you again dear old paper diary). I'm fully seeing why we should jump on the workspace bandwagon for the purposes of differentiation. I would like to see us use a call back day at the end of the year to re-introduce the amazing affordances of this product, but as Terry tells me, the whole staff would likely hate me for that gem of an idea (it was his idea anyway). I'm also extremely proud of how I can see the advantages and affordances of Toby Mini and am applying them in my daily teaching life. Super cool. 

What I need help with: Just that I can see that Explain Everything would be cool, but I cannot work it out to fit what we do just yet. Possibly this is indicative of too many things in my head. I may just need time. Also, I'm finding more and more that kura should pay for a teacher's cell phone. It is a bit mental how often we rely on these for just about everything, yet there is no compensatory mechanism. Quite possibly a tablet device as well should be paid for. It would certainly make doing our jobs as digitally fluent teachers much easier.

Opportunities I can see for myself and/or kura: differentiation meaningfully and a way of directing how our HoD's establish that as our normal; it is all very possible.

Dorothy's session today focussed on "empowered" as a part of the kaupapa of Manaiakalani. 

I remember Pat Sneddon coming to Hornby, presenting to us at Templeton Primary in either 2014 or 2015 and pretty much this exact quote coming out of his mouth. It may have been the first time someone presented me with te Tiriti in such a way as I saw that we could use it, almost weaponise it for a cause within education. 

Empowerment as a kaupapa is for both teachers and learners. A lot of educators prefer to use the word agency over empowered - sounds fancy, but is it actually what we want? Agency is a bit hopeless due to how lower decile communities - the association to the concept of social agencies who don't always help these communities has a negative connotation. Rather than continuously explaining the word, the choice was made to change it to empowered as that was the main concept that was used to explain it beyond the leaders informing and developing the pedagogy. 

This is not "just a tool"; it is transformative and therefore empowering. This concept is referred to in our curriculum, which was written prior to digital affordances being common to our classrooms. "Just a tool" detracts from empowerment. 

Matt Goodwin's blog link - which he wrote in reflection from lockdown was referenced in the speaker notes of Dorothy's presentation; http://pesgoodwingold.blogspot.com/2020/05/distance-learning-engagement.html

    "...Without having the students seated in front of me, how could I entice them to 'come to school'? 
    > Certainly a percentage of my learners had whanau who engaged with the online learning, and    'assisted the engagement' (in fact this was really cool to see our whanau making these connections to   school, and is a great conversation starter for what we could do to keep this going).
    > But there was a whole other percentage who managed themselves. They got themselves up in     the morning, got out their chromebooks and engaged with the learning and online meets that I provided.... "

During lockdown Matt felt that empowerment moved to a new level with their education. If they weren't into it, they didn't do it. They used their voice, choice and ownership of their learning. Are we un-institutionalising them? Yes, but probably to the detriment of their NCEA results, which is their formal measure, which maybe needs to be changed to reflect all of this. Our community standards still must be challenged to reflect that NCEA is NOT a measure of a safe, healthy, contributing and functioning member of society. Any 'schooling' should be about raising these, not moulding a child to be just like their teacher (great man theories) nor about creating specialist 'understanders' of a few skills in a range of areas, rather they need to be independent self motivated life long learners. NCEA is not fit for this purpose any longer as I see it and I find my frustration levels are rising in this area professionally.  

Some whānau in Tāmaki are earning $19.000 a year and still functioning with very good budgeting. When you are earning $19,000 per year and raising a family, yes you might be happy, but the lack of money does disempower you - no internet and no device to access it fluently would be indicative of this. Online shopping, bill paying, access to credit (laybuy, afterpay, etc), communication with those scared to be around agencies, let a long the information that one could use in managing the relationships with these agencies effectively and positively, all comes from that one aspect itself. Yet, there is the 'skin in the game' the parents are ensuring their is device ownership with. Not everyone is on that $19,000 bracket; we often refer to as the 'working poor', where there just isn't quite enough to go around, work is there but is not stable and the inequities that exist in every tier of our social constructs affect how these whānau can function and provide for their children. The 'skin' is still in the game at Tāmaki. It begs the question about our rangatahi and whānau. Are they putting their skin in the game? Our recent PB4L data suggests that whānau engagement is still our weakest area. It's the egg we struggle to crack. Everything else in PB4L's latest Tiered Fidelity something or rather, rated our practice as quite well embedded except for that. 

When our children are entering school with the mean performance of a three year old, they are consistently going to be playing catch-up. Starship hospital provide Auckland with a research measure to know this information. It is not just academic it is physical, emotional and spiritual - I think it is much like the B4 school check our little ones go through in Canterbury which I remember as a mum with a visit to the local nurses clinic - checking what skills our child had and how many letters they knew, as well as if they recognised emotional cues, amongst other things.

An average decile 10 child has heard 32 million more words than your average decile one child; not dependent on the language spoken. The questioning conversations to and forth with child to adult are potentially missing. AND there is a one third turnover of children in a decile one community at primary school. Over two years the class is 2/3rds different. However, if you intentionally teach young people how to have conversations, you can extend and begin to over come this. Hence why T shaped literacy is so important. This directly links with the four themes that are prevalent in our TAI sessions across cluster as well as the High Leverage Practices we have been presented with from the Wolf Fisher research.

Kerry Boyde-Preece's presentation worked the new digital technologies curriculum - This presentation builds on from empowering. The ideal that we produce creative directors rather than passive consumers of technology. 

Kerry pointed out that fluencies and technologies are different; one is making use of the tech, one of them is leading and evolving with tech. I think that is something we all know when we examine it but it's not up on the surface of our understanding.

The curriculum itself is divided into three strands; practice, knowledge, nature of.

Practice - user, knowledge - products, nature of - the why. In fact this works nicely with Simon Sinecks golden circles, which regular reader(s) of my blog would know that I'm all about that shizz (possibly one and a half of you).

Two distinct areas of the new curriculum - computational thinking (CT) and DDDO -  the three strands interweave to create; computer science and then design and develop digital outcomes. The aesthetics over the programming. DDDO is like our new area, CT is like a modernised version of ICT to reflect real computer science like we would see at university level and with programmers. There are 8 progress outcomes for each of these two areas. CT progress outcomes are very black and white and based on understanding how things work and what is right and wrong with them. can be taught in a completely unplugged manner.

You could look at a unit of work and consider how to include CT and DDDO into what you already do, rather than this being a stand alone subject. I think this is and interesting way to look at, as this stuff is actually pervasive in our social construct, so why would we teach it to be very separate when the very nature of it is what is going to help empower our learners in the bigger world. 

Marks session -- future of technology

So we always thought that humanity's greatest strength moving forward with AI is creativity. However, what if AI can learn creativity? I'm not going to lie, there is an element of fear here for me with this topic, as well as a moral challenge. Every time I am presented with what we have achieved with stuff like robots that look, sound and act real, my mind it taken to "How many starving children could you have chosen to feed instead? Why do you not have an ounce of ethical responsibility that you would spend billions on that instead?".  However, that is something I am unable to affect directly, though if enough smaller voices were heard, maybe that could be another story. I watched the star train of satellites overhead on Monday night with my own child and we marvelled at them all the same. "Sophia", skin vision, cora; these are all examples of the tech learning and creating its own solutions, which is effectively where the aforementioned creativity sits. We are looking for new solutions to problems, challenges and contexts.

Mark points out that ethics and morals are not well covered with this, including with the new digital technologies. why on earth do we not have an equivalent ethics and morals curriculum? we do somewhat with Health. but he very act of branding it as "health" and pigeon holing it, means its spread and capture is not wide enough. Health is essentially an ethics and philosophy course. It frustrates me that it is branded as something so superficial when it covers so many more depths and layers. 

When it came to coding, it left me cold. I see it as sequencing, on a crazy pedantic level. I also wonder if we cannot just teach sequencing or identify where pure sequencing occurs in our already existing work and note the skills we already teach as coding unplugged. 

Mahi for next week:

- Making sure I know what to do for the certification exam.

- Spending more time reworking how we post blogs with reference to the work Naomi Rosedale has done with MAPIC

- Hapara workspace - more of this.