Semester Two Ideas

This week is the week of module planning for semester two. Working through combinations of what could be taught together. Something I am looking forward to.

Technology has the focus on two areas of interest for me, it is also something that I have explored in depth.

In the foundation module, this is our theme and context.

Questions to think about:
How might the Partnership enhance the understanding of citizenship, systems?

SEMESTER 2
CITIZENSHIP What is Citizenship?	HOW THINGS WORK
To EXPLORE by researching the impact and influence of design. (link with characteristic of technology) To MAKE SENSE by analysing existing practice to find meaning. (design history) (creation of material)	To MAKE SENSE by understanding systems, process and components.
Focus: Characteristics of Technology (minefield) Design History Physical, Environment, Social, Cultural	Focus: Technological Systems Process Transformation Control

I love the idea of what is citizenship and have an idea which is around Digital Citizenship, Being able to look at what other ideas exist out there through netsafe and the THINK ideas. But it is also something that we need to continue to look at within our school. Get some student voice and develop ideas on where to think about the next steps forward. We had Lynfield college talk to us last year and show some of the examples of their work.  It is also something that I had students at my previous school develop some ideas around through the web rangers initiative.

I link to the video that Jamie Curry developed to support this initiative.

I think this could work in with Drama or English really well.

Now, term 4... Technological systems, this is one that is potentially one of excitement, and one that could benefit from me pairing up with drama. Doing the csunplugged and developing resource and ideas for primary school children through the activities. Being able to look at the cs unplugged show that has been running through the University of Canterbury.

Being able to develop new clips with secondary age children to explain the concepts through a performance could offer a new challenge for students to develop their drama skills. I look forward to what is put out for us tomorrow.

My other alternative for an english co-taught module would be one around text based games. I meet a home schooled students last year who was developing her own text based adventure game through a
system called playfix, which uses a natural programming language called Inform.

Playfic is a platform for writing and playing interactive fiction.Interactive fiction (aka "text adventures") is a genre of game that uses no graphics or sound, but instead, uses text to tell a story in an interactive world. 

Playfic is a way to write interactive fiction and publish it entirely on the web. Playfic uses a "natural language" programming language called Inform 7 that's easy to pick up and difficult to master. You're able to make your first simple game within minutes. 

The best part? Playfic runs from your browser, so there's no need to download any programs to use it. You can write a game and publish, instantly creating a clean URL that you can send to your friends. What are you waiting for? Go explore!

http://playfic.com/learn/

Now the thinking for SPINS.

Student voice has been around Programming, as well as some students would like to learn how to put a computer together, thanks to one of my old schools I have a number of old computers available for students to pull apart and put back together. I am wondering of the computer together could go into term 4. That leaves a gap for me next term to think about. Part of the citizenship would like me to think about something different and to really unpack the idea of physical, social and cultural.

Qualification SPIN will be around programming, but I am also considering digital information to help develop the database ideas and concepts that may be of help later on.

What to teach in the programming module, knowing that there will be newbies as well as experienced programmers, I have been thinking about the concepts that I wish to teach which will be able to be carried out through scratch and python.