Parent Support Sessions

Today we had the first session of our 3 part Tuesday series for parents of our current Year 3 students going into Year 4.  The focus for these sessions is on supporting parents to parent more confidently in a digital age.  At the beginning of our session today we had a chat about what people would like to see covered and we then proposed three sessions which might look a bit like this:

1.    Introductory session and discussion about what will be most beneficial.  Introduction to app “Book Creator”

2.    App:  Explain Everything.    OSS BYO Website,     iTunesU course:  ‘Digital Parenting’

3.    Settings, Restrictions, Family Sharing, iTunesU BYO course

To start today’s session I shared an article written about the latest changes to the AAP’s (American Academy of Pediatrics)  guidelines regarding screen time.  It is an interesting article as previously this organisation has adopted an on/off switch mentality when it comes to children and screen time.  Now however, the AAP states that “our policies must evolve or become obsolete”.

The new guidelines, amongst other things, refer to the need for balance and that parenting does not change if the digital arena is involved.  They also make the point that all screen time is not equal and urges co-engagement.

Other things we covered in this session:

We looked briefly at restrictions on the devices and how to set these up to ensure that the device is safe and secure.  We will come back to this in session 3.  We also talked about games on the devices and this included mention of Minecraft.

We looked at our first cross curricular app – Book Creator, which is a fantastic apps that enables students to create multi-modal type texts which can contain drawings, text, images and audio.   It is an app that we use right from Prep through to our Year 4-6 BYO program with the level of use becoming more sophisticated as we move higher into the school.   I showed a few examples of use right across the school with a sound book in Prep, an innovation on a text in Year 1 and examples from Year 4.


We had an interesting discussion about why the use of Book Creator in one particular instance was better than pencil and paper or whether indeed it was.

And it really depends on what the purpose of the teaching unit is at that time.

  • It could be for the student to publish their work.
  • It could be for the student to interact with features of the text being studied or created.
  • It could be for collaborative exploration of concepts being taught.
  • It could be for students to express their ideas.
  • It could be for students to record audio, which gives them the opportunity for feedback about fluency.
  • It could be to engage the students in a task which is collaborative, creative and requires multiple modes of communication.
  • It could be as a means of the student being supported to edit their work.
  • It could be as a means of children exploring punctuation.
  • It could be as a means of students publishing for a particular audience.
  • It could be to house digital artefacts that demonstrate their learning.

We talked briefly about models that support teachers to design learning experiences that best utilise technology.  If you would like further information about this, please read this blog post.

Thanks to the parents who attended today – it was a really useful session and our next one is next Tuesday at 2.15pm.

 

 

 

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