Draft Digital Technologies Curriculum for Consultation - How does it impact my School?

I'm sure you have been reading in the media that the Ministry of Education has released a document for consultation around Digital Technologies in the Year 0 - 10 Curriculum. You can find the document here.

The document begins with the statement "Our education system needs to change how we prepare our children and young people to participate, create and thrive in this fast-moving digital world." The purpose of this Year 1- 10 curriculum is to ensure that all students are able to use digital technologies to solve problems and take advantage of new opportunities in this digital or second machine age. In Years 11 - 13 they will be specializing these skills  for industry and how they can lead the next generation of innovation.

There are three strand to this curriculum:

1. Technological Practice

Students develop  a range of outcomes, including concepts, plans, briefs, technological models, and fully realised products or systems. Students investigate issues and existing outcomes and use the understandings gained, together with design principles and approaches, to inform their own practice.

2. Technological Knowledge

students develop knowledge particular to technological enterprises and environments and understandings of how and why things work. Students learn how functional modelling is used to evaluate design ideas and how prototyping is used to evaluate the fitness for purpose of systems and products as they are developed.

3. Nature of technology 

 students develop an understanding of technology as a discipline and of how it differs from other disciplines. They learn to critique the impact of technology on societies and the environment and to explore how developments and outcomes are valued by different peoples in different times.

Within this document there are also eight outcome statements for the Curriculum Levels. Below are the outcomes expected for students at the end of Year 10 & Year 13.

By Year Five (Progress Statement Three) students will be able to:

- develop a basic computer programs in a block-based programming environment

- understand the need to be precise because computers cannot infer

-  make algorithms more efficient through the use of iteration (repeats/loops)

-  understand that multiple algorithms can have the same outcome but are not necessarily equally efficient.

It is noted in the Plan B Report that by 2030,  "80% of work will be collaborative and 20% will be individual. Currently the workplace is 80% individual and 20% collaborative."

Skills required in our future will be ideation, long term pattern recognition and complex communication. This draft document promotes this shift and it will be interesting to see how schools/ teachers react to this change.

To think about this as a technical change would be mad! Simply saying to staff 'well, we have to do this' would be the wrong attitude to take. 

Rather, we should look at this process as an adaptive change. This involves looking at:

- What your values as an educator/ school are

- Why you are making this shift in practice

- How you will make this shift in practice

- What you will do with the students to achieve this shift in practice

- Launching multiple experiments and analyzing feedback/ data to see effective practice

- Drawing together the 'Collective Genius" in your school/ CoL - Everyone has gifts and talents - make sure you harness these individuals

Historically 70 - 80% of organisations fail in to shift in a moving context because they fail to focus on these five questions:

Why - What are the opportunities & threats?
How - Do we design our learning journey?
Who - Do we collaborate with?
What - Steps do we take?
Where - Are we heading to?

If you are reading this post think about your school today and discuss these questions with your team. If there are some grey areas then these could be your focus.

- Do we have a single sign on for our students?

- Are we operating one platform? (G Suite or Office 365)

- Do we have an e - learning strategy?

- Do we have an e- learning leader/ team to develop our staff?

- Do we have a minimum standard of integrating technology into classroom practice?

- Are our students creating content for others or passive consumers of content?

- Are our classroom operating under the Substitution model (Pen & Paper - Device) or Redefinition ( Creation of new tasks) under the SAMR Model