When something is unfamiliar, there is a scale effect - things seem bigger, harder, scarier when we have never done them before. So it was for this course, the first journey to Manaiakalani HQ felt like a looooong way to go on a Friday morning. Now that the roads, faces and format are familiar the scale seems normal, the journey seems shorter and the course has passed very quickly.
In our WWW this morning, I said that the name, 'Digital Fluency Intensive' is an undersell of what this course involves. It is far more. We are all familiar with the time poverty experienced by teachers; one of the effects of this is that 'new' resources, ideas and practices are not able to be capitalised on or are understood at a superficial level. Dorothy reiterated her stance that the devices are not JUST a tool. I would add to that, Kootuitui, as a Manaiakalani outreach, is not JUST devices. The quality of teaching is crucial to our learners' success and the learning needs to be at the centre of decision making. Yes, we can increase engagement with digital devices, yes we can increase engagement with creative 'doing' but if this engagement isn't leveraged for learning, we are not making the difference our learners deserve.
Most of the day was dedicated to future thinking, facilitated with fantastic skill by Zoe and Vivian from OMG Tech. My thinking was really challenged, and there is a lot of good stuff percolating in my brain that I will make sense of over the weekend. Sometimes big ideas need to float around for a while before they become clear. More to follow...
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