Kawa of Care : Cybersmart Facilitation

Monday mornings in my classroom see Mr Matt Goodwin facilitating a Cybersmart session with my students.  This week's was the first of the lessons to happen due to the state of Aotearoa in the last two weeks.  The lesson focused on the Kawa of Care, specifically in helping the students to connect with the Kawa of Care as a document and an agreement that they have a stake in.

The Kawa of Care is an agreement between students, parents and schools in the Manaiakalani Cluster to ensure the best care and responsibility of the device is exercised during each student's time in the Manaiakalani Programme.  If you would like to know more about Manaiakalani's Kawa of Care you can click here.

I was interested to see how my Year 4 and 5 students who are 'brand new' to chromebooks would respond to content from the Kawa of Care.  They were all able to connect the dots after Mr Goodwin made connections to simpler things they would have all experienced - (eg. paying someone to mow your lawns - contract - 2 people needing to hold up their end). I know that the lesson also served as a well needed reminder to some of the 'veteran' Year 5's in my group.

As a beginning teacher of digital learners in the Manaiakalani cluster, my takeaways were : 

• The Kawa of Care is something that is beneficial to reference in things like Class Treaties when starting the year.  I have added this into our working classroom set of rules.
•  When I talk about chromebooks in class, I can refer to the Kawa of Care to help use the language to create a shared understanding of it.
• What I hope for my students is that they can take ownership of their chromebooks and look after them in a way that upholds what they and their whanau agreed to in the Kawa of Care.

Some of my student's takeaways were :

• Beginning to understand that using a chromebook at school is a right and a responsibility that their whanau have agreed to, that their schools has agreed to, and therefore something they need to agree to honour as well as their part.
• Their "part" is to follow the Kawa of Care.

Here is the DLO the students worked through with MG.

MG provided a template that has been designed to help break down the Kawa of Care document into a basic reading response style task.  The template is what is linked at the top of this blog post.  My notes from the session are here. 

If you would like to know more about Manaiakalani's Cybersmart programme you can click here.