2016 - A year of change

Welcome to Digi-Tech in 2016. It's now week 2 of Term 1 and the new classes are settling in well. In particular, I'm really impressed with my Year 9's. They have shown themselves to be a hard-working bunch and I can already see some potentially great, budding programmers amongst them.

Last week was really busy and I think I met every Year 9 student in the College while we spent a good part of a day setting our school Gmail up. Now, most of our Year 9 students can now log into their Gmail, Print, create a Google Drive document and have their device for BYOD on the school network. A big THANK YOU to Ms Bublitz in the library for her work with the BYOD stuff and her help with getting usernames and passwords working.

This year will undoubtedly be another busy one. There are some changes to the previous Year 9 DTE rotation. The Technology Faculty are working on putting in place an Integrated Technology Programme - very exciting - watch this space for info!

I won't bore you with an enslaught of professional goals in here, but I will just quickly say that this year I plan to work on bringing in some a stream of achievement standards. These will be include things for those students who are into programming.

This year, the Year 9 DTE programme is also changing. While we learn those important basics about ergonomics and touch typing, we're also learning how to do some basic programming using pseudo code. This is lots of fun and we can even choose a theme to use within the learning platform. While I thought that the Star Wars theme would be the popular one, I was surprised that the majority of the class voted for the Frozen theme. And so Frozen it is.... As a Star Wars geek I suppose I'll just have to "Let it gooooooo....".