EdTechTeam Summit

So much learning gained at the EdTechTeam Summit over the last two days! Don't even know where to start at the moment but excited to dive in with some of these ideas to inspire and innovate with my students next term.

Day 2 Reflection:
Affirmation, Idea and Challenge.

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Creativity takes courage!

This year we are trialing a new Makerspace course in Year 9. Prior to starting this I'd done lots of reading and research but there's nothing like the real thing to learn from! So far this term, I've been setting challenges and teaching skills around using the resources we have. A lot of the learning has incorporated exploring learning competencies such as collaboration and critical thinking rather than focusing on content knowledge. Last week we focused on the learning competency of creativity and discussed why creative thinking encourages deep learning. So this week I decided to loosen the reins a bit and let the students loose on the resources. We talked about how the best creations come out of a personal interest or motivation, or out of a desire to solve a problem. We talked about how 'problems' could be as simple as being bored and that a creation might be something to solve that problem. We also discussed how coming up with ideas is often the hardest...

Tour Creator Tutorial

My Year 9 Makerspace class are going to have a play around with this new program next week so I made a tutorial video so they can have a bit of guidance as they create a tour. The uses for this program are endless! How awesome would it be for students studying a country to be able to create a tour of important places in that country, adding information about points of interest as they go. Check out my short tour here .

Launching into Term Two

After a whirlwind Term 1 where I was getting my head around a whole new subject area as well as teaching lots of new students and new levels of the curriculum, coming into the second term I feel much more confident in my planning. This term I have new Year 7 and Year 8 classes taking part in Digital Technologies as we have termly rotations through the Technology subjects. This gave me a chance to reflect on what worked and what didn't in the first rotation and refine the unit plans accordingly. One of the major changes I made to the Year 8 program was doing some 'offline' programming before we jumped into programming with the Spheros. On reflecting on the unit I taught in the first term, I found that although most of the students got a general understanding of Computation Thinking from Progress Outcome 3 in the new DT curriculum, they couldn't use the key language (e.g. algorithm, sequence, selection, iteration, debug) to describe what they were doing and why. This ...

Digital Technologies at Bream Bay College

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