Planning Matihiko

Stage two... the concept is set, it's time to get creating. With limited time myself and my amazing colleagues (3 Digital Technologies Teachers) set about expanding our plans into some lessons.

Topic 1 - It's Happening! Argh, I'm pretty excited and also a bit of a geek who likes pictures to sum up ideas. So each topic was given an animated gif. This one is to represent both the fact that the new course is coming alive and also the reality that Digital Technologies is happening. We need to embrace it and our school, students, whanau need to understand it.

This topic is all about giving students the foundation. Get their own devices set up to be efficient for them. Organise their google drives. Learn what each of the google tools is best for. Learn some tricks of google searching. 

Topic 2 - The Secret. This topic is all about letting students in on some special secrets, in other words, some great tools available on the internet to make some pretty amazing graphical outcomes. We give students time to experiment with some graphics tools and at the same time discuss concepts such as Binary and how data is stored, file types and good design.

Topic 3 - Any Key. Homer is still looking for the "Any Key" but I'm hoping our students will be a little faster at finding the special keys they need to create some code. This is the Computational Thinking topic, based around learning text based coding, it also includes the functions of devices (Input - Process - Output) and a bit of history into old computer games.

By dividing up the topics into lessons, assigning lessons to each of us we spent 3 days of lesson writing. Bouncing ideas off each other, checking in on timing and understanding plus lots of chocolate and coffee it was actually a lot of fun. Planning should be done this way more often!

I am very grateful for the focus my school has been given to this. The next challenge is to staff the classes and upskill the staff ready to teach at the start of 2021.