DFI #8 Empowering Learners & Rock, Paper, Scissors - Computational Thinking

What a great journey we have been on over the last eight weeks. Alongside the DFI I have also started on a journey to review our schools strategic plan with the help of the Springboard Trust Programme: Strategic Leadership for Principals.

This week at DFI we explored the kaupapa of "empowered". This is also one of the key words in the vision of St Francis of Assisi Catholic School. This week at the Springboard Trust workshop we started to unpack our vision and look to see whether it was time to review whether this vision was still relevant for our school.

I felt like it was serendipity that in two workshops this week I was able to unpack this word and see what it meant - not only as part of the Maniaiakanlani kaupapa but as part of the vision of our school - the vision we have for all learners in our school.

Our vision: Choosing to be an innovative Catholic Learning Community that inspires and empowers learners to succeed.

The Manaiakalani kaupapa of empowered is about learners being able to take control of their learning - it actually mirrors the kaupapa St Francis of Assisi Catholic School has about students having agency. I understand why Manaiakalani use the word empower - the word agency has different connotations in the Manaiakalani decile 1A community than it does in ours however I like the word empower more anyway. 

At St Francis of Assisi we want to empower our learners to succeed, we want them to be digitally fluent, have agile characteristics, and we need our learners to be empowered to contribute to the future - the big picture.

We will be working more on unpacking our vision over the next couple of months - one thing though that I can say is that the word empower is one that we want to be part of our vision moving forward.

New Learning:

This week we also explored computational thinking. We had time to explore a few different programmes that offer learning in basic coding. I loved this explore time. I have played around with Scratch before so decided to find out more about Microbits. Might have to purchase some of these for our code club - was a lot of fun.

Here is my Rock, Paper, Scissors game, and the code behind it.