DFI - Computational Thinking

 

The focus of DFI week 8 was computational thinking. We learnt about the new Digital Technologies Curriculum and the Manaiakalani principle of empowerment. My favourite part of week 8 was having the opportunity to explore different coding apps and sites that students can use. The websites/apps that I enjoyed learning about the most were Lightbot, the MineCraft Hour Of Code Tutorials and Scratch Junior.

I also enjoyed having the opportunity to look into a couple of teacher's Class OnAir sites to see how they have been teaching computational thinking with devices. I looked into my colleague Clarelle Carruthers' Class OnAir site and found it useful seeing how she has used Scratch Junior in class with students of the same age. It was also useful to watch her teach the class how to code using the Codey Robots as I would like to teach my class how to use these as well! 

 

Above are photos of my students beginning to learn how to use Scratch Jr as well as the Scratch Jr activities site that we have been following.

During DFI week 8, we were given the opportunity to choose a break out group based on the coding programme we were interested in learning more about. I chose to learn about Scratch Jr as I have wanted to use this in class however wasn't confident with it. We were introduced to the activities section on the Scratch Junior site, which not only helped me to learn how to use the basics of Scratch Jr, but were also so helpful to use in class with my students! Over the course of the week, I went through the activities with my class. Although many have had practice on Scratch before, it was a great way for them to learn a lot of functions they hadn't used before!

After going through several activities as a class, I planned a lesson for my students to create an animation of their own. I read them a story called Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road by Jim Dewar and Simon Williams. As a follow up activity, I asked them to choose to characters from the story and animate one part of the story. It was a lot of fun! I'm looking forward to getting creative and using Scratch for future follow up activities or as a fun whole class activity.

A tool that I learnt about from my fellow teacher Clarelle last week was the Classroom app for Apple. During DFI we have been learning many handy tips on Hapara (Teacher Dashboard) for example, how to view students work. I realised that not all functions on Hapara work the same on iPads as it does for Chromebooks - for example, viewing students current screens. I connected all of my students iPads to the Classroom app on my iPad  last week and it has been incredibly useful! I would highly recommend it to any teachers whose students are on iPads.