‘Big ideas’ being developed for digital technologies curriculum

By Education Gazette editors

Issue: Volume 95, Number 19

Posted: 25 October 2016

Reference #: 1H9d5D

By the end of this year, the key conceptual ideas of the digital technologies curriculum will be developed and tested with students and teachers.

The English-medium digital technologies working group has started locking down the ‘big ideas’ of digital technologies.

The working group has started the detailed development of the new digital technologies curriculum content in the Technology Learning area.

“The working group is using the flexibility of The New Zealand Curriculum to design the new digital technologies curriculum content and is building on current leading edge international thinking to take it further than what’s been done previously elsewhere,” says Karl Le Quesne, the Ministry’s Acting Deputy Secretary, Early Learning and Student Achievement.

“The Ministry is developing the new curriculum content following a blueprint for how curricula will be developed going forward,” he says.

“This focuses on students developing key conceptual ideas around the ‘big ideas’ of a discipline rather than using achievement objectives."

“This approach has been used to design the Learning Progression Frameworks for reading, writing and mathematics, and a limited development has been undertaken for social sciences and health and physical education.”

By the end of 2016 the ‘big ideas’ and key conceptual ideas of digital technologies will be developed and tested with a group of students, teachers and the Digital Technologies Hangarau Matihiko Curriculum Reference Group. In 2017 the design and development process will be informed by, and run alongside, a much more extensive trial and consultation period with schools, students, teachers and with industry stakeholders.

In addition to developing the ‘big ideas’ over the next year, the group will map the significant learning ‘signposts’, which describe a student’s increasing understanding and use of digital technologies knowledge and skills; develop and test rich tasks for and with students; and engage and test their ideas with students, teachers and industry stakeholders throughout the design process.

A Māori-medium hangarau matihiko working group is running parallel to the work of the English medium group. We’ll update you on their progress in a future edition of the Education Gazette.