Digital Technologies

Digital Fluency, Literacy or Technology: what’s the difference?

Posted on July 5, 2018 by James Hopkins

Digital fluency remains on the lips of many educators and leaders around the country at the moment. TKI suggests ‘A digitally fluent person can decide when to use specific digital technologies to achieve their desired outcome. They can articulate why the tools they are using will provide their desired outcome.’ (TKI) But isn’t it a little more than that? I would argue that a digitally fluent person also understands who the learning audience is and, as a result, how to create the most impact. Beyond that, it’s an understanding of where to publish to reach an audience.

“Digital tools make it easier than ever for our student creators to share their work with the world beyond the classroom. When I share how to use my favourite tools, I always come back to the why and the who. Why are we asking students to create a video, design a webpage, record a tutorial? And who is going to see their work?” (Burns 2015)

It all gets a little confusing as the original defining parameters and elements grow. If we include everything suggested, it could be something like:

For those using a text reader Click here

So, are we there? What about the interaction and understanding of models like Dr. Ruben Puentedura’s SAMR model? I suppose it could be argued that in incorporating SAMR into thinking, you show a clear understanding of both why and who digital technology can support.

Isolation or interaction?

Much of the challenge remains around how we view the terminology we use. Looking specifically at the terms technology, literacy, and fluency, we could view them as a ladder. For many years the SAMR model presented as a ladder has been a successful metaphor and model used in schools. Teachers understand that reaching Redefinition will transform student learning. If we apply this to technology, literacy, and fluency, we start with technology, we step into an understanding of literacy, and finally, we reach fluency. Like any ladder analogy, we accept that no one is a superhero, and no one is able to fly straight to the top. However, what about when you finally make it to the top? If technology changes, are you still at the top or do you have to start climbing again?

Looking at the three terms with an interdependent lens, they may perhaps look something like the graphic (left). I believe they interweave, interlink, and must not be viewed without knowledge and understanding of the others. In much the same way as all must be experienced to reach the top of a ladder, the difference here is that we understand things from a cyclical perspective. ‘Digital technologies’ remains the what. It’s the thing we can point at and touch. In order to use it successfully, we need to understand how it works and how they could be implemented in teaching and learning. We need to be literate. For true success, though, we must be discerning. The splatter gun of ideas and short-lived experimentation must be limited to a phase and cannot become a habit. Therefore, we must know why we use the tools we do and never lose sight of the impact we desire it to have. We aim to be fluent. Whether you agree or disagree, I hope the clearest element here is that we cannot see the device, its function and its ability to transform learning in isolation. We need to understand all to truly leverage the power technology can bring.

What does a digitally fluent teacher look like?

If I use my graphic above to illustrate my thought process behind my answer to this, it’s as follows. I know what technology is out there and that my students have access to. I have a clear understanding of how to use it and apply it to my teaching and learning practice. And finally, I understand and can justify why I feel it will improve my student learning and outcomes. Right? Maybe…
The challenge we face is that technology is ever changing. Digital Fluency isn’t like your driver’s license. With that, you learn to drive, you sit the test, you are awarded your license, and that’s it. As long as you don’t commit infringements and stay within the guidelines of the Road Code, there’s no need to re-sit your test on a regular basis or reapply for your license. Why? Because the car hasn’t really changed in its functionality or primary operability in the last 50 years. Please don’t misunderstand me, technological advancement and changes to propulsion efficiency and method, comforts, accessories, and safety have been tremendous. But the actual process of driving hasn’t changed. Seat belt on, engine on, into gear (with or without a clutch), mirror, signal, check, manoeuvre.

On the other hand, look at mobile digital technology. The cell phone has evolved hugely. Those who could confidently tap the number into the portable cellular phones of the 1980s have had to learn all the functions of the modern smartphone. Even the name has changed. Whereas an early cell phone could simply make calls, now their feature lists are enormous. A cell phone now, put simply, does more.

Now, you could be forgiven for thinking that the simple laptop hasn’t changed much. But, stop for a moment and just think about what you can do with a $300 Chromebook that your Satellite Pro of the 1990s couldn’t. It video calls, it hooks up to the internet (without a dongle or cable!), it has no need to read CDs or DVDs. Its hard disk drive (HDD) is capable of storing endless multimedia that will wirelessly stream to no end of other devices and can be updated from even more. Unlike the phone, a modern laptop may still share physical appearance features with its ancestors, in much the same way as I have my family’s rather large nose, but the way they operate, and their user interfaces are extremely different.

Coming back to the original point of achieving Digital Fluency, we need to continue to reflect on the ever-changing devices within the technological world, their functionality, and work out whether they will add genuine value and enrichment to the lives and learning of our students. A digitally fluent teacher is simply one who understands what resources are available to them, how they operate and why they might use them. They are able to adapt, learn, and evolve in order to keep their what and how current, and ensuring their why meets the needs of their students. And so, I touch very lightly on the new Digital Technology and Hangarau Matihiko learning areas of the New Zealand Curriculum and Te Marautanga o Aotearoa. If, in my opinion, remaining fluent requires us to learn and adapt to the changing face of digital technology, why not learn alongside our learners? Why not explore wider concepts and computational thinking next to our five-year-olds? Or perhaps APIs and design principals with our high schoolers?

The bigger picture

Through digital enablement, the act of preparing and enabling students through the use of digital devices to function in a more digitally motivated age, we have the opportunity to blend the old with the new.

Many of our strongly held values and the Key Competencies haven’t changed, but our context has. We need to incorporate the values and behaviours that have guided our students successfully for many years with the new skills associated with a truly global, digital citizen. Our learners will continue to need support in developing resilience, empathy, kindness, respect, and determination. But what do these elements look like in the digital world?

As access to technology as part of learning becomes an expectation of many students across New Zealand, the behaviours and guidance our students need to navigate the unknown world they’re heading for are needed more now than ever. Alongside teaching our junior primary learners why they need to keep their hands to themselves in the playground, we need to be teaching them the importance of (metaphorically) keeping them to themselves online, not lashing out in anger. As we model clear communication and language to share our learning journeys, we must ask what the same communication might look like in an email or online forum. How can we teach these in the real world without modelling and teaching them in the digital world — the one they are potentially going to spend even more time in than us?

In the lives of today’s learners, digital is the norm. If we’re not teaching the digital generation of learners we are presented with, then just who are we teaching?

Comments, please!
I would love to know your thoughts on this. Add your comments below.

DT in DT and HM: Design thinking in the Digital Technology and Hangarau Matihiko Curricula

Posted on June 12, 2018 by Philippa Nicoll Antipas

“With its focus on design thinking, technology education supports students to be innovative, reflective, and critical in designing new models, products, software, systems, and tools to benefit people while taking account of their impact on cultural, ethical, environmental, political, and economic conditions.” (Technology in the New Zealand Curriculum, Ministry of Education, 2017)

With the strengthening of Digital Technologies and Hangarau Matihiko within the Technology learning area in the New Zealand Curriculum, and the Hangarau Wāhanga Ako in Te Marautanga o Aotearoa, this has prompted change for schools, kura, and Kāhui Ako. While there is certainly much that is new to the learning areas, something that is not is design thinking.

Design thinking has always underpinned the Technology and Hangarau curricula because this these are learning areas that are process-driven. Both technology — in all its forms — and design thinking are about identifying problems, creating solutions for people, experimenting, refining, acting on feedback.

So, while we’re grappling with new concepts and content, perhaps the strengthening of Digital Technologies and Hangarau Matihiko is also an opportunity to put the spotlight back onto the process of design thinking and its mindsets.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is a creative process that can be adopted to find solutions to complex problems. There are various models of design thinking, but one that is often cited is that created by the d.school at Stanford University. This has five phases, as can be seen below:

The NZC doesn’t suggest a particular model, but in the English translation of the draft Hangarau Matihiko document, the following steps were outlined:

Dedication — to people and their thoughts and feelings and knowing the users and their needs. (Empathy)
Define — the major issues and the available pathways.
Propose ideas — formulating concepts, and outcomes / solutions. (Ideate)
Original model — construct an original model. (Prototype)
Experiment — test the model and adapt correspondingly. (Feedback)

The two models map comfortably onto one another. But, design thinking is about more than process, it is also about choosing to adopt innovation mindsets.

What are the design-thinking mindsets?

Again, Stanford’s d.school suggest the following mindsets as being key for design thinking:

Given the opening quote from the New Zealand Curriculum, and the design-thinking process suggested by Te Matauranga o Aotearoa, here, we will focus on three particular innovation mindsets:

human-centred
culture of prototyping, and
bias towards action.

Human-centred

In the context of Digital Technologies and Hangarau Matihiko, the focus is on creating technology to support people. People are, and must be, at the heart of the design process. There is no use designing a solution to a problem that doesn’t work for the people concerned. This is why empathy, being human-centred, is the fundamental component of design thinking.

Culture of prototyping

When we think we have a solution that might just work, it’s important to get that idea out of our heads and into the real (or digital!) world. This allows the idea to be tested, for us to challenge our assumptions, and to find the flaws. Prototyping — making a model — invites us to use our creative and critical thinking. A prototype is primarily a vehicle for feedback from the very people for whom we are designing the solution. Based on their feedback, we refine, adapt, and change our solution: we iterate. This mindset calls on us to hold our ideas lightly, to be human-centred, and to be prepared to alter, or even abandon, our proposed solution based on new knowledge.

Bias towards action

When grappling with a problem it is easy to be stuck:

What is the problem?
Who is it a problem for?
How do we know it’s a problem?
What can we do about this problem?
What if we try…?

A bias towards action mindset calls on us to acknowledge this learning phase and to move towards doing something about the problem. It is closely linked to the above culture of prototyping mindset. Identify and define a problem; let your imagination loose to find multiple ways of solving the problem; then filter down to one or two key possibilities that you make tangible and test. It is like being in ‘beta mode’. We are used to having to update the apps on our smartphones in order to make them work better and more efficiently. We don’t sit around and wait for everything to be perfect before we release the solution into the wild. We prototype, test, and refine. We innovate.

How might we…

Let’s not lose sight of the underlying design-thinking process and its mindsets when exploring the brave new world of Digital Technologies and Hangarau Matihiko. In fact, we could well use the design-thinking process to give structure to our exploration. Perhaps a starting question could be:
How might we integrate Digital Technologies and Hangarau Matihiko into our local curriculum?

If would like help with building a design-thinking approach to your curriculum, get in touch!

Resources

Image credits:
Feature image: by the author
5 phases – d.school K12 Lab Wiki (used by permission)
Mindset for design thinking – d.school K12 Wiki (used by permission)

Posted in

Conversations around writing

Posted on May 15, 2018 by Allanah King

I have had a number of conversations recently with teachers about the role of digital technologies in the teaching of writing. I spend a lot of my professional learning delivery around the teaching of writing with a focus on Māori and Pasifika boys through Spirals of Inquiry — looking at making changes in teacher practice to engage and enhance learning experiences for their learners.

I have a habit of saying that the changes that we make to our practice need to make enough of a positive change to warrant the time and energy for teachers to learn new things and strive to make things better for their learners. We need to ensure that our time is well spent as there is not a lot of it to go round.

Teachers with school entrants are telling me that children need to learn to write by hand first before engaging in digital technologies and that too much ‘screen time’ is bad for young children’s brains. The media bemoans that children no longer know how to hold a pencil.

And, those that I work within a secondary school argue that using digital technologies is somehow ‘cheating’. When doing assessments, students having access to the red squiggly line to draw attention to and correct spelling mistakes, use the right click for Thesaurus or Speech to text in Google Docs gives some students an unfair advantage somehow.

I would disagree — as you would expect me to, I suppose.

We have discussions in primary schools around when to start using a keyboard. I would say, as soon as children start school or before. I don’t think we are ready yet to completely do away with the need for people to be able to write with a pen or pencil, but I don’t think it needs to be given the emphasis that it once had. I acknowledge that watching a young child unfamiliar with writing digitally peck away at a keyboard can be frustratingly slow, but we can’t wait until they are seven years old to have them become familiar with the keyboard. That is passing the buck to someone else and leaving it too long.

For my students, I would give them a ‘get out of jail free’ pass if they could print legibly across the curriculum. They would then no longer have to participate in handwriting lessons and could do other more engaging things such as learning how to locate keys on a keyboard and touch type using the myriad of free typing websites and apps. On reflection, maybe it should have been the other way round — those who struggle to write legibly need even more access to digital forms of being able to write.

Learning to touch type would be nice, but again, I don’t think it is as important as it once was. Google Voice Typing, Siri, and other accessibility features make touch typing less important. We explored using Swype with my year four students and they picked it up really quickly. With Swype, you glide your finger over a mobile keyboard to form words. You get very fast at typing with just one finger.

We have discussions in intermediate and secondary schools around NCEA assessments and the way some institutions and practices are clinging on to ways of the past. I think many secondary schools are yet to embrace BYOD cloud-based platforms and accessing a computer suite a way of addressing digital needs of students like primary schools do. Primary schools tend to enable more ready access to devices throughout the school day and across the curriculum. I fear for more digitally capable students leaving primary schools and having limited access to devices as they mature through the education system.

I want all students to have access to the support of the digital technologies that I have as an adult:

the ability to choose the right tool for the job — iPhone, iPad, iPad keyboard, Apple Pencil, Chromebook, laptop…
the right-click to support accurate spelling, grammar checkers, thesaurus
digital planning and editing tools
the ability to publish my work and gather feedback from others as I am doing here.

‘I tell teachers about a year eight student who I showed how to use Voice Typing in Google Docs. Up to that stage he had only really ever written using Clicker7 throughout his primary school years and after all that time was still not a confident writer and still needed adult assistance. On my next visit to his class, he showed me an assessed Level Four piece of writing that he had done on his own, on a device that everyone could use. I had a small tear in my eye as he said he could see himself now as being a writer, which he never could before.’

If we were to just assess the finished writing sample, could he truly be assessed in writing at Level Four or do children have to have struggled with writing with a pen or finding letters on a keyboard and spell them correctly to say that they really are Level Four Writers? Is it the process or the product that is important at the end of a learning journey?

How often and for what purpose do you write with a pen? For me, I might scribe some notes as a ‘to do list’ that I want for a physical reminder and make an attempt at a Christmas card or two for elderly relatives — but that’s about it.

Think of our students’ lives beyond school.

Think of the world that they are entering — their futures — not ours.

When do you write with pen and paper? So why do we still put so much emphasis on that skill?

Image credits:

Feature image by the author

Allanah leads PLD focussed around Māori and Pasifika boys writing.
If you would like Allanah to lead PLD in your school, contact her now.

If you are in another region, CORE provides expert facilitators capable of providing PLD in digital technologies and literacy. Enquire now.