DFI 6 Tonui colab

Where do I start - these blog sessions are always at the end of a long day and since that day is also a Friday I sometimes struggle to get coherent thoughts out of my brain. I have to point out that it is never for lack of inspiring stuff we have been doing on DFI Fridays or during the week.

Today we were at the Tonui colab/Ex mindlab which has got to be one of the most pleasant work spaces around - period, Gisborne or elsewhere. We were joined by the esteemed David Winter, who I originally thought was just a local teaching dropping by, but turns out to be the outreach adviser for Manaiakalani - or something to that effect. David talked about visibility and the need for student work to be seen  or sometimes not seen depending on what it is. I had a good chat to him about schools moving into inquiry based learning and that sort of stuff. I really liked his analogy about thinking what the lowest rung is on the ladder and who is holding on to it before we start to take it out.

We then kicked off with the Tonui crew and a Kahoot on computational thinking - a guy called Robbots took an early lead then got smoked by David, Cheryl and Perky. I - whoops I mean Robbots was manually pressing those answers within nanoseconds so the top three must have had some of Elon Musk's neural links inserted, like in the video Shannon showed us next. Shannon did a fantastic presentation about the new digital technology curriculum. I have been doing a lot of  research about this myself and she nailed it with a concise and well thought out summary. She talked about the future of jobs and automation which is a pretty interesting and at times depressing topic. A guy who I really admire and have referenced in this blog before is Yuval Noah Harrari, who is an Israeli historian. I don't know of anyone who does a better job of connecting the dots when it comes to explaining how automation will impact us. I agree with Shannon that there are exciting prospects for some but I also agree with Yuval who predicts the rise of the "useless class". It sounds like a pretty insulting term, but he uses it to intentionally be provocative and start some uncomfortable conversations  about where we are heading.

On to something lighter now. We had some fun with a bunch of the CS unplugged type activities and I will be using some of this stuff next week when I get my new year nine and ten classes to experiment with for next years digital technology courses. Once again I was impressed with the lessons the Tonui crew presented and will be stealing a few ideas. It will be interesting to see how much prior learning the kids come with in the next few years - hopefully by year eleven they are able to code and come up with their own fantastic ideas for projects. I can see the kids fusing their ideas and knowledge about coding, robotics and horticulture for instance to create real hardware and software applications for the real world.

We finished the day off with a bit of robotics and 3D madness in Cospaces, which is yet another tool that the students can go crazy with. Willie and I came up with a great narrative and we should be scripting an actual movie or animation in the near future, probably a romcom featuring a character named Fancyboy and a witch. Great day - thanks to Shannon, Emily, and Mac.