My approach to teaching digital technologies

See also: teaching, teaching-digital-technologies, my-approach-to-teaching-mathematics, computing

A (ever-)growing set of ideas.

To do

• What is the whole school plan for digital technologies?

• School resources for

  • Makey Makey, Arduino etc, sensors, robots etc - input/output devices
    • Alternative use of mobile phones (possibly questionable from data privacy etc)
  • Audit technology access

• Explore approaches to project-based learning

• Digital Technologies Hub AI PD

Philosophy

• my-teaching-philosophy

• focus on making, design on digital-humanism

• make it impactful and cool

• a dual focus on learning how to

  • go through the process of design, iteration etc
  • learn the technical K&U
    • Play with your materials
    • which links somewhat to effectuation and building capital

Idea bank

Creative Coding

As a potential theme, creative-coding offers an application of digital technologies that are a little more creative and out of the ordinary than others (e.g. not gaming). Also potentially offers ways to touch on the key concepts of digital technologies, including:

• data representation

  e.g. poster: bitmaps and visualising sound

• Turtle Art Tile project outcome of a project from Victorian teacher (blog post)

Unifying/underlying practices

From the very earliest lessons embed certain language, practices and processes into what I do

• Design thinking steps from unpicking-technologies-education or similar - see unpicking-digital-technologies-hub
• Making the core concepts (see unpicking-digital-technologies-hub#Core Concepts) into artefacts and practices in the classroom
• Rubberducking with code and examples
• me having code and digital solutions I'm working on - having a process to share them

Encourage C3 B4 ME

Identify problems of interest and impact

The ability to "solve problems" is positioned as important in the learning area. Have observed difficulties with students finding problems that are of the right type of interest and relevant to the curriculum needs. Which in turn link to the investigating and defining strand (e.g. AC9TDI8P04)

Suggesting a need to develop

• a bank/rubric/structure for identifying and thinking of problems.
  • Remind me of birthdays etc.
• a math watch like activity where students are encouraged to track needs/problems of people in their everyday life and report them.

Pedagogy

See unpicking-technologies-education#Pedagogy

• examine the unplugged resources
• formative assessment strategies
• Raspberry PI quick read on understanding program comprehension - the-block-model
• Programming journal

Platforms

• Block based programming

  Provides a good overview of various block programming environments

• Github Global Classroom - get free copilot?

• Code Puzzle - Parsons problems
• Python Tutor - can visualise python code
• App Inventor - create IoS and Android apps