Inquiry Seminar Digital Technologies 22 May Meet Up

On Wednesday 22nd May, teachers focussing on Digital Technologies met up at Featherston school to hear about and contribute to ideas around this inquiry topic. We started the session off with a sharing of ideas:

• Andrew from Featherston School shared how he was using Khan Academy for engaging boys. Khan Academy has some great resources for the classroom teacher, it integrates with google classroom and best of all is open source.
• Andrew then shared some ideas using epic, google classroom, chromebooks and music maker.
• General discussion continues and Storyline online was discussed and successes with reluctant learners was shared along with Reading Eggs.
• Sheri from Greytown School then shared more about Epic which is free at school, but at home there is a fee (ebooks and audio). One of the great features is the ability to set up reading groups.
• Rachel from Kuranui College shared Education Perfect, but it is expensive. you don’t set them tasks, interesting to see how they are doing
• Rachel then went on to share what she is doing in her Movie Maker course. Her inquiry this year is on integrating elements of the Digital Technologies curriculum into the course. Editing is a concern and she is looking for affordable tools for students to edit with. The aim is for every student to edit.
• Liz from Kuranui College shared how she is supporting student agency with the use of Google Classroom. It was interesting to see how she has laid out her courses. 
• A general discussion followed on with the sharing of Trello as a tool for supporting planning.  Students can use this tool to help them organise their projects
• Gem – epic reading and mathletics (free for a month) 5 and 6 onwards (pay a fee) looking at how much students are doing what is the value of using this. How does mathletics assist the learning of maths. Taking ownership of learning.
• Alice from Kuranui College shared what she was doing in her Social Science junior Money Matters class of 30 students. With her senior History class the challenge is  “how to communicate ideas in depth that are not writing essays” and not slideshows. Their are a range of ideas for presentation, how do they publish their podcasts for example.  What digital media outcomes could be utilised. How can ipads be used with  juniors.
• Tracy then talked about gamification in the classroom to engage buys. Coding with juniors using beebots to teach algorithmic thinking. 

The session ended at 4.48.

Wero for next session – This will be a short 5 minute video of your practice. 

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