A/Prof Katrina Falkner attended the ICTENSW Conference on the 15th March, participating in panels discussing the adoption of Digital Technologies within the NSW curriculum, and presenting on the CSER Foundations-6 MOOC. This was a fantastic opportunity to catch up with teachers from the Foundations MOOC, and to discuss current implementation issues and directions across Australia.

At this event, we also launched our next CSER MOOC, addressing the Digital Technologies curriculum for teachers of years 7 & 8, supported by Digital Careers and Google. This new course is open for Registration now, and will start on the 1st May, 2015.

The CSER MOOC – Next Steps builds upon our work in the Foundations-6 MOOC in helping provide support for teachers who are engaging with this new curriculum area. The Next Steps MOOC is a project-based course, exploring the design, implementation and evaluation process for constructing Digital Technologies projects. We use a combination of visual programming and general purpose programming languages, recognising that although the Australian Technologies Curriculum refers to skill development in general purpose programming at this year band, not all students and teachers will have had the opportunity to explore visual programming in prior classes at this time.

We look forward to working with teachers from across Australia in this new course. If you are a teacher of years 7 and/or 8, and are interested in Digital Technologies please join us in the open, free online course. Please feel free to share with other teachers, and come along even if you are not teaching at this year band.

In a similar fashion to the Foundations-6 MOOC,  the creation of a community to share project and activity ideas will be crucial to the operation of the MOOC. We look forward to welcoming you to our new community!

You can join the course here: csdigitaltech.appspot.com