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Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid of Tech

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At BSD Education, we engage teachers in conversations about technology everyday and it is a topic that stirs the room with mixed emotions and reactions: “I don’t have time to bring tech in the classroom”, “I am really not great with computers” or “Technology distracts my students”, making technology the antagonist of their classrooms.

We want you to know that in your classrooms, full of digital native students, your role as the teacher has never been more important. Technology and technology learning is inevitable for our students. This might include learning how to use Google Drive effectively, or learning the fundamentals of coding and programming to create a website or a game. But, do the students understand how to apply these tools and skills in the real world? This is where teachers shine and excel as experts to curate and design a curriculum that helps students connect the dots between their digital world and the real world.

For example, in a Year 2 classroom at a school in Hong Kong, we collaborated with the lead teacher to create an inquiry project for their History and Inventors unit. Students learned how to build a website and harnessed the power of the web to document and share their learning through embedded videos and images responsibly and safely.

In this collaboration, BSD Education experts took care of the tech learning by providing a customised guided project and the teacher infused the project with their curated subject knowledge. In the classroom, the teacher remains the facilitator and expert of content, context and encouragement to students in their inquiry journey.

Instead of seeing technology as the antagonist of the classroom, it can become the trusted sidekick that complements your subject expertise in designing a powerful learning experience for your students.

Bring Creativity into Coding

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Historically, coding projects has been seen in isolation as purely a ‘tech’ skill, focused on logic and reasoning rather than creativity. However, this is changing as it becomes increasingly clear that technology needs to be part of every solution.

Students need creativity when coming up with solutions and designing end products. You can help your students understand and apply the creative elements of coding by giving the project a creative context or encouraging them to focus on the end product and user.

Making a project creative:

In 2018, we worked with 520 girls from local schools in Hong Kong on designing wearable technology. With a theme of creating things to enhance daily life, the girls had free reign over their designs.

They had to learn and apply coding skills and think about how they could use them creatively. As a result, we have seen light-up coats for dogs, light-up umbrellas for when it rains and gets darker, and temperature-sensitive flashing t-shirts.

By giving a more creative context for their project, students understood that coding could be used for many different things.

Focus on the end product:

At BSD, all of our coding projects finish with an end product. This isn’t just because it is fun for a student to build something, but it encourages them to think about who will use their product and why. So get your students to build an app by applying the design cycle.

As part of this, students need to prototype, get feedback and think about UI and UX. They need to be creative to build a well-designed, appealing, and functional product for the desired audience.

Have you tried coding projects that focused on the creative side of coding? We want to hear from you! Please send us your work/student’s work or project ideas at info@bsd.education!