What do we do in the Digital
Technologies Subject?
- learn about the nature and the safe, ethical and responsible use of information and system
- are provided with opportunities to be creative and innovative and create sustainable solutions to meet client needs and opportunities to real world problems, and
- create sustainable solutions by using a design thinking process of investigating and defining, designing, producing and implementing, evaluating and collaborating and managing.
Teachers allow creativity and innovation to flow by:
- Encouraging risk taking – mistakes are tolerated!
- Providing opportunities for open ended tasks and tasks that are authentic/real world
- Encouraging different outcomes rather than expecting prescribed outcomes
- Using a student-centred approach, where the teacher:
- models and provides explicit skill instruction (I do, you watch - I do, you help - You do, I help - You do, I watch)
- encourages students to reflect on their learning and how they are learning it
- encourages collaboration and engages the students in the hard, messy work of learning (opportunities for students to practice, practice, practice)
- uses pedagogical approaches that are experiential, challenged, problem and/or inquiry based, personalised, differentiated, and asks the big questions
- provides opportunities for the students to negotiate the curriculum
- models a growth mindset
- makes time for brainstorming and the active soliciting of ideas, and
- is supportive and provides timely feedback.
By sustainable we mean encouraging students to consider:
- Environmental sustainability – how they might preserve resources for future generations and avoid waste
- Social sustainability – how they might work cohesively and collaboratively, persevering on a task/solution
- Financial sustainability – the cost of the solution, the $ value of the proposed solution
- Technical sustainability – what is possible now with the available technology... student’s must have an opportunity to reflect, evaluate and review previous solutions and consider alternatives given any improvements in technologies.
- Economic sustainability - the opportunity cost, what one has to forgo given the problem of scarce resources.
