Kath's Digital Journey

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...

Next year, 2021, we will start teaching a new class we have called " Matihiko ". Matihiko, a Te Reo -Maori word, means Digital. It has been a long process to get here, even to come up with a name. But I am very excited to be this close to teaching our first classes. The background Changes to the NZ Technology curriculum saw the addition of two new areas added "Computational Thinking" (CT) and "Designing and developing digital outcomes" (DDDO). Anyone who is across this will be very familiar with these two areas now. This came from years of research and work by a number of groups including Min of Education, industry, tertiary education and teachers associations. The need is there for our future contributors to society to have vital skills and understanding in Digital Technologies and they think ALL students should at least have a chance to learn these skills.  Why a new course? We have a strong and well established Digital Technologies department. We are l...