Planning for DT in a play based classroom

Planning for digital technologies is vital to the sustainability and the richness of task when using technology in the classroom. It ensures critical and creative thinking is at the centre of using technology integrated with the NZ Curriculum. I usually encourage schools to decide on their end product, what the students are going CREATE, INVENT, SHARE and work backwards from there to plan what the students need to know, understand and be able to apply using digital technologies, in order to be successful through the inquiry. However, recently I worked with a school that was play-based and this approach was not going to work for them. We decided we still needed to plan because otherwise digital technologies would just not be embedded into their practice. We came up with these graphic planning organisers, based on student urges and schema, with some critical thinking prompts using a variety of Apps from their digital toolkit.