DFI Online - Our Cybersmart day

Wonderful to reconnect with everyone today at our online DFI.  Today's focus was on being Cybersmart and ensuring we teach students what that means.   Fiona Grant gave us a really comprehensive overview of the Manaiakalani Cybersmart programme.  She talked about how it was developed and emphasised the importance of giving students time to practice the foundational skills of being Cybersmart, especially in today's online interactive world. 

The default for our learners should be positive, thoughtful, helpful when they connect online.  They need to be able to discern from the plethora of information on the internet what serves their interests and what they should ignore.  Giving students lots of opportunities to engage with people positively online like when they are posting and commenting through school blogs, will help them to develop confidence interacting in an online space. 
Helping them to understand the difference between what's ok to share publically and what should be kept private is fundamental to them establishing a good digital footprint. Posing the question; what kind of information are your sharing about yourself?  What will we be able to find out about you in ten years time?  I imagine this could cause a bit of internal conflict for some of our teens, who in those formative teen years spend a lot of time focusing on their online image.  Inviting students to discuss how they feel about sharing online, looking at examples of good and bad sharing.  Within the Cybersmart curriculum is a whole range of resources designed to educate students from the correct use of digital media to developing their smart footprint, how to be smart legally and more.  Click here to see the full programme.

Our aim should be to use Manaiakalani's Cybersmart programme to foster active, involved lifelong learners who are empowered to interact online positively. 

Term 2 week 1 - Covid19 Lockdown

What a fantastic week it's been, this online teaching really suits me and judging by the feedback from the teachers I'm working with it's suiting a lot of them as well.   The teachers at a high school I'm working at are so encouraged by the high number of students who have been turning up to their online classes during this first week of term two.    I do wonder though how it's working for students, their experience could be very different and we need to take that into account in the coming weeks.

To support our teachers with some of the new skills they'll need for online teaching my colleagues and I from the Te Hiku and Kaikohekohe Clusters have been running some short online toolkits.  Today I ran one on Hapara Teacher Dashboard.  Hapara was originally developed by the Manaiakalani hackers' group to give teachers visibility to students' learning and forms an essential tool for teachers delivering Manaiakalani's Learn, Create, Share pedagogy.

Python challenges

Today I was working through some CodeWof tasks with Python.  It's been a few weeks since I've practised so it was pretty hard, the success though when you get something right is so satisfying!  I only wish I was having more of them.  Fail Fast is the programming mantra.  Keep making those mistakes, it's the only way to learn.

The first challenge I took on board was to write a programme that would ask you for the year you were born, the current year and then it would tell you how old you would be this year.  Here's my code below which worked, YAY!

For the next challenge, I had to write a programme that would repeatedly asks the user for the current temperature of a machine.  The machine must shutdown if the temperature is 50 or greater, or if it is 0 or less. If the temperature the user has entered is within normal operating temperatures, then print Temperature OK. If the temperature is too high or low, then your program must stop asking for the temperature and should print Shutting down...

This part of the problem I got right but it what I couldn't figure out was how to use the 'while' function to keep asking the user what the temperature was.  I had another problem, there were floats in the inputs.  Floats are numbers with decimal points which in this scenario need to be rounded to a whole number. I think I have the round function, I can't work out how to put it together.  

Example:

• Function call round(x) returns the nearest int to the float value x
• round(45.6)
• Here round is the name of the function
• 45.6 is the argument

I've just come across the main keywords for Python which will be super helpful from beginnersbook.com 

Day 8 Lockdown

My day started out with a hangout meeting with our Manaiakalani supervisor Anne Sinclair.  I'm so lucky to have professional development support from Anne.  Our conversations are always so inspiring, leading me to come away full of ideas and purpose. 
Today we talked about what a unique learning opportunity, disruptions like Covid19 can bring.  As tragic an event as Covid19 is, it's also an incredible historical moment for everyone. 

Teachers and their students will all be having different experiences that will inevitably impact how we learn in the future.  The question is, how can we maximise the affordances of technology to help us understand what has happened at this point in time?   With all the data being generated around Covid19 there are real-time interactive maps like this one from John Hopkins University.  and a timeline map from Mapbox. 

New businesses, new ways of communicating, interacting, working, learning will emerge as a result of this global pandemic outbreak.  To respond to all this disruption in an educational setting, our pedagogy needs to be agile, culturally responsive and inclusive, something I'll be exploring further. 

The afternoon had a much lighter tone and I participated in Manaiakalani's Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu Google Hangout led by Fiona Grant.  Thirty-eight educators from around the country joined in, sharing and discussing ideas of how to make the most of the Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu programme.   Fiona reminded everyone about encouraging students to include images or videos that are visually eye-catching for their readers.  Not only will this help students develop their understanding further but their posts will likely attract more attention, particularly in our twitter feeds.