DFI Day Eight - Computational Thinking, Blinking, Clicking, Hyperlinking

Empowering the students!

That was the theme for this session. Manaiakalani are big believers in establishing rangatiratanga - encouraging others to change themselves for the better, taking control of your own life.

This doesn't necessarily mean you need to go out and be the one to making the most money, it means that you take what life throws at you and use it to influence how you succeed in all your endeavors.

This lead into a discussion of how we will be encouraging our students in becoming digitally fluent to problem solve in the digital world - creating digital ready people for jobs that are yet to come!

Digital Technology has become the new scare in education. It's all brand new and we as creatures of habit do not like new. This journey with DFI has assisted in helping me understand this new strand of Digital Technology. It's not as scary as we make it out to be, it's just the fear factor kicking in. All basically is, is understanding the technology that we use in our every day lives. 

It's just someone seeing a need or a problem, thinking of solutions and then constructing software or something that solves that problem or need. For example, phones. We use them everyday but we don't think about all the time and effort someone went into seeing this need and initiating a better solution, which is our mobile phones that are forever being developed. Someone out there is using computational thinking!

Computational thinking is about thinking like a computer scientist, not always acting like one. Always thinking about the specific purpose of the need or problem and how it will benefit and support the end user.

Using devices are apart of computational thinking but are not the end product, so it's important that we give our students the experiences they need to develop these skills using plugged (devices) and unplugged activities to get them problem solving. Thinking outside the square! (Please bare in mind that using devices is not the new literacy!)

Pro tips:

Ethics and morals need to be taught to students to implement them in their inventions, as technology does not think and feel like humans unless we program it too!

Cyber smart is so important, and confidence is key to build the students into becoming proficient users that understand and know how to contribute to towards a product that solves problems.

Well that's all from me today.

And, if you have reached this point, you are a legend! Thanks reading!

Stay tuned for the next post!