From the President, 2 August 2009
Hello everyone,
Digital Technologies update.
On Thursday the Ministry of Education released the document :
This is ground-breaking stuff! The subject Digital Technologies has been recognised as having a definite place in the secondary school program. Teachers following the Digital Technologies program will be key to also helping the development of ICT across the curriculum, but the importance of having specialist teaching for Digital Technologies itself has been acknowledged. This document outlines the specific knowledge and skills in each of the five strands, Programming and Computer Science, Digital Infrastructure(hardware and networks), Digital Media, Digital Information and Electronics.
There is the potential for schools to have separate courses following each of the strands in year 13, and a combination of the strands for courses in year 11 and year 12; or to have combinations of the strands in each year level in secondary school, depending on the needs of the students and teacher resources.
Note that the subheading indicates “Material for consultation to support Ministry Decision making”. It is absolutely essential that you each and everyone add your voice to indicate that this is the direction you wish this subject to go. Please go to this link and have your say, so that the Ministry can make informed decisions. The document is available on this website, as well as the NZACDITT Google group website.
Membership
The membership form has been improved to allow for colleagues who are student teachers, as well as those in tertiary and industry who are directly concerned with this subject, to be paying members.
A point of clarification about the email lists. Those who are members of the Google Groups list, are informal members, and are able to have discussion with other members. Those who have paid their subscriptions, are formal members. Those who are formal members will be issued with passwords and logins when the site is upgraded shortly, to allow access to resources that will be available on the website. I plan to sort out my e-mail lists, so you don’t receive duplicate copies (which is not such a bad thing for some J), but personal issues are taking up quite a lot of my time, so please bear with me on the multiple copies. I would encourage you to become paying members of the association, so that our voice is strong in the right places.
Day Out /AGM on 6th October, 2009
Thanks to Maurice Alford our chief organiser for getting this off the ground. Please support this initiative as it offers great PD, is the AGM for NZACDITT Inc, but more importantly, you get the opportunity to network with like-minded colleagues. There will be workshops in both Christchurch and Auckland. Christchurch events are under the umbrella of Ulearn09 and In Auckland, MIT is sponsoring the events. See this document for further information on this. All attendees need to be registered, asap.
DTG
The Digital Technologies Guidelines project is into the third year, and it is thanks to all the work done by many teachers with Ministry support that have brought us to the stage of having our own subject. Any schools still wishing to join this initiative, please go to the www.dtg.tki.org.nz website, or look on page 16 of the 27 July EdGazette. There is a lot of professional development planned for schools in this project, so it would be very worthwhile to get teamed up into a DTG cluster, and take this opportunity of learning being offered.