Within my role as a Manaiakalani Outreach Facilitator, the majority of time is spent working in the secondary school sector. Facilitation in a secondary school setting does look slightly different to what might occur in a primary school setting. One of the reasons for that is the pressure high school teachers are under to deliver a curriculum that prepares students for NCEA. It's often thought it difficult to run lessons throughout the year that focus just on the Cybersmart curriculum. Instead it's more about integrating the Cybersmart curriculum across subjects and embedding them into teachers' lessons.
Working with a teacher of a Year 9 Social Studies class today's focus was on Smart Surfing.
This class are learning about our Kiwi Culture and identifying what aspects make up their own culture. I modified the Smart Surfing lesson from Manaiakalani's Cybersmart curriculum adapting the key search words to align with their topic focus. I also extended the search functions to show students how they could search for different time periods which was interesting especially as there were no news updates for the mid 1950's and 1960's. Next steps are getting students to think about whether or not their search findings are reliable.
