Group 9 How are you preparing students for the future?

When I started in the role as Digital Mentor at my school, one of our first tasks as a staff was to collaboratively develop a vision for the use of technology at our school. One of the key elements of our vision is around developing and fostering student creativity.

Our students develop creative thinking through a range of real-world, meaningful creation-based projects across the suite of native Apple apps. For example, designing a game to teach students what can and can’t be recycled, designing orientation videos for new staff and students, and creating an interactive spreadsheet to assist our PE teacher to record and track sports day results. Students engage deeply in the projects because they have purpose and meaning to them.

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How incredible that you are preparing your students for the future through providing real world learning opportunities using the technology tools to apply in purposeful contexts.

Thank you Martina for sharing your story of using technology to innovate and prepare students collectively as a school for their future. I agree that students have higher levels of cognitive engagement with the new ways you are redefining learning using technology by enhancing creative thinking using game design for sustainability.

Thank you Martina for sharing your story of using technology to innovate and prepare students collectively as a school for their future. I agree that students have higher levels of cognitive engagement with the new ways you are redefining learning using technology by enhancing creative thinking using game design for sustainability.

One of the key skill areas mentioned in Jennifer Marshall's talk this morning was ‘resilience, flexibility and agility’.

Key skills

By having students learn with technology, I feel we are giving students lots of opportunities to build their strengths in these areas. I am a big fan of technology and the connected, digital world. However, the reality is that things do not always go to plan in the classroom – both with and without technology. Or, even if everything works as the teacher intended, a student's approach to a task may be different from their peers, which can create different obstacles and hurdles. And also, opportunities.

What I love about how my middle schoolers think is that when something does not quite work, they don't give up – they try a workaround, they hotspot, they get a friend to airdrop, they collaborate on a classmate's device, they use the accessibility features on the iPad. And they come up with solutions that had not even crossed my mind. It is through these acts of collaboration and problem-solving that today's students are building their skills in resilience, flexibility and agility. And these are skills they will need throughout their whole lives.

Resilience. Children had different needs to be able to achieve outcomes. Some need step by step instructions and others just want to explore and find things out for themselves. These options need to be available for our students so they can all achieve.

The aspect that struck a chord with me was Resilience. Helping to support students who are at risk with being resilient and managing the digital component of their lives. The significance and often critical nature of the digital component of the lives either as a supportive connective mechanism or as a disruptive and impactful aspect.

With our students having high, almost ubiquitous connection helping them to manageable their digital well-being and enabling their digital agency is significant.

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In our school we have been working with Year 3 and 5 teachers to collaborate on a shared problem-solving task whereby they need to design and create sustainable farming options. The students have been using Swift Playgrounds and a 3D printer to create prototypes for this project. This opportunity has helped them develop capabilities that will help them in the future in the areas of creative thinking, analytical thinking, technological literacy, curiosity and lifelong learning, resilience, flexibility and motivation.

Teaching using the iPad as a tool for learning allows me to prepare my year 1 students for the future by developing their technological literacy skills. I do this by incorporating a range of apps into my learning experiences for example, students wrote a procedure to fix a problem. They then created an ingredients and equipment list on the Numbers app and drew images of these on Sketchers School. After that, they created a Keynote where they typed up their procedure. Finally, they imported their drawings and added animations to match the written method. The students were extremely engaged and enjoyed having the opportunity to be creative #ANZSUMMIT24

We have had a strong focus on Writing at our school, based on our data and student surveys, which suggested the majority of students had an extreme dislike fir writing. We created a unit which gave students an opportunity to activate some of those skills - Analytical and Creative Thinking (Head), Motivation and Curiosity (Heart), and Technological Literacy (Hands) - in creating a text for some Junior students based on a Mentor Text study of The Encyclopaedia of Dangerous Animals. Students researched a variety of animals, before creating their own unique animals combining traits of existing animals (eg. Hippopotobee). They brainstormed these in Writer’s Notebooks, before publishing them using Keynote to mimic the layout of the text. These are now being combined in pages, to publish for our community.

We run an annual maker-fair style festival, which gives all students from P-6 an opportunity to create something based on class learning that term or a passion project. This creates high levels of engagement as student learning is personalised and self-directed. They are collaborating in various groups, seeking and giving feedback, and then putting together a presentation. Parents and families are invited to come in for the final presentations/displays across the course of a week. Classes also go visiting each others displays. Through this lots of questions are asked and answered about systems and processes used to research, design and create the final product. Many students who previously may not have been overly enthusiastic to complete a project, let alone talk about it and answer questions, really shine and demonstrate their knowledge and understanding, through curiosity and creativity.

We are preparing our students to be creative & motivated…

• We provide our senior students with STEAM Club, providing our students with technology and resources to give them opportunities they wouldn’t be exposed to in their everyday life.
• We share their learning with their Whanau (family) and the Community at Open Days, OPScars
• We have a cluster of school that are of similar size and interests. We have run STEM Expo’s where a larger audience are able to view students learning.
• We are providing students with Real-life experiences/examples, 
• Local Curriculum - Paku Waitara o Aotearoa - Stories of Aotearoa
• Creating Atua Apps (Māori Gods) , Holograms (a creative way of sharing students understanding & teaching others what they have learnt)
• School Trips - visiting Local Businesses - Egmont Village, PukeAriki, Pukeiti, Mounga (mountain), using technology to explore the area around them

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A passion project of mine is running a Senior Biology camp to Stradbroke Island (Minjerribah), with two key goals at the heart of it:

1. Connecting our on campus students with our distance education students (coming from all over the state, regional, remote and urban), to build interconnectedness between our campus cohorts and build awareness beyond self through shared but different experiences
2. Motivating our students with real world relevance of biodiversity and sustainability in a changing world, whereby they collect data with sensors and observations of low and high energy rocky shores, mangrove and wallum environments and analyse with their iPads and Macs in collaborative ways.

We are striving to build a framework of motivation (heart) > independent and interdependent thinking (head) > problem solving (head) to deliver meaningful learning and character-building outcomes (hands). Whilst the WEF’s 2023 Future Of Jobs Report was calling some of these soft skills, most are moving to “professional skills” or similar to emphasise their importance in the development of our students.

We also wish to work more closely with representatives from Quandamooka and the University of Queensland to create partnerships.

With the onset of AI and all related facets, it’s exciting to now authentically build that into future sessions to further prepare students to be future-ready. 

Students collecting sand dune data