Last day of the DFI

 Today was the last day of my journey attending the Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Intensive.

Our focus at the start of the day was on empowerment. Unfortunately many of the whanau of our learners exist with a lack of empowerment. This has been made worse by two years of Covid lockdowns and restrictions. Unfortunately that is reflected in many of the social statistics in modern Aotearoa. The challenge is to combat this and many of initatives that manaiakalani have are designed to combat these.

Our attention turned to the future of technology. In particular what does this mean for our young people. The world is shifting particually around the area of automation. Theere are break through technologies around the world such as Elon Musks' star link and even in New Zealand companies such as rocket lab are changing the dynamic as to what is possible. Increasingly, Robots are replacing humans and changing industries such as agriculture and manufacturing. The development of these technologies means that is crucial to have a conversation about whose world view is reflected in these platforms. Awareness is crucial of any biases that may exist in terms of Artificial Intelligence.

We were joined by some amazing year 6 students from Point England Primary who showed us real life examples of how the Manaiakalani Learn Create Share Kaupapa is embedded in their school on a daily basis. They were amazing ambassadors for their school.

An opportunity to explore coding software is always fun and I am going to challenge myself to find opportunities to use in my classroom.  The afternoon was spent exploring applications such as scratch to develop our coding skills. It was a lot of fun and I can see how students would enjoy engaging with this technology.

The DFI has been an amazing learning experiance and I feel more equipped as a teacher with my digital technology skills and look forward to embbedding this in my practice.