Blog #4 Digital Fluency and Scratch

This week we studied Digital Fluency.

Digital fluency is described as the ability to use technology to achieve your desired outcome (Howell, 2014).

I always considered myself to be digitally fluent in my work as an IT Professional, but after completing a few of the tasks in this subject, I realise that I am only digitally fluent in certain areas. My area of work consists of troubleshooting computer hardware, software installations and network issues. I am very proficient in these areas as well as with basic Microsoft Office software and some coding. Beyond that I would be as bewildered by the applications we have had to use, as anyone else in this subject.

I am a hands on learner and would rather try to work things out before reading a manual, but other people may learn differently. This is something that teachers will need to take into account when teaching their students new applications.

We were required to make a Scratch animation for this weeks tasks and I found this to be very frustrating. Trying to get the sprites to change direction and move where I wanted was tricky. Adding sound and flow was also very time consuming. This is a good application and students would probably have fun with it, but I think that, as a teacher, I would need to allow quite some time to teaching the students how to work with it. Click on the image below to view my Scratch video.