Technology

technology Curriculum Overview

Technology Literacy

Beginning in kindergarten through the second grade, students are exposed to many forms of technology including iPads, Chromebooks, PCs, and programmable robots. Students learn basic operation, keyboarding (as well as other inputs), terminology, and advanced shortcuts effortlessly during regular use of these technologies for computer science, projects, and playing educational games. Young learners will further reinforce their keyboarding skills with a dedicated keyboarding curriculum. By the time students leave the fifth grade, students will be proficient in proper typing technique, with fingers always anchored at the home row. Students will learn the basics of gathering and organizing data using technology, such as building spreadsheets, tables and graphs. Students will learn how to share documents and contribute as members of a digital learning community. 

To middle school students, technology will be a major tool used in just about every class and every project. Digital collaboration will be commonplace with students working together on digital projects over the internet and organizing their digital workplaces.

Computational Thinking

We use computer science as the vehicle for learning computational thinking in the technology curriculum. Kindergarteners explore algorithm composition, decomposition, sequencing programming steps, and even object oriented programming in early code learning apps such as Scratch Jr. and Kodable. First and second grade students will expand on the above by learning about debugging and program control. By the end of the fifth grade, students will further expand computer science skills by decomposing problems with layers of abstraction, nested program control, defining functions, introducing memory management, and begin looking at program optimization.

Digital Citizenship

In kindergarten through second grade, students are introduced to basic digital citizenship concepts such as composing emails, creating passwords, learning who can be trusted, online respect, privacy, and how to use search engines. Third through fifth grade dive even deeper with concepts such as identity and identity theft, fraud, making healthy digital choices, copyright law and plagiarism, and managing digital friendships and communities. In middle school, we further reinforce safety, kindness, and effective use of the internet by examining advanced search engine topics, identifying scams and "click bait," dissecting digital selfness, information permanency, stereotypes, creator rights, and, as always, cyberbullying. At the end of the day, all students will come to know that being a good digital citizen isn't all that different from being a good citizen in your community, city, state, and country.

For school related technical questions, please contact us at techhelp@stpiusdocs.org