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Technology education: What has changed?
The Ministry of Education has revised the technology learning area in The New Zealand Curriculum. This has included strengthening digital technologies | hangarau matihiko. The goal is to ensure that all learners have the opportunity to become digitally capable individuals. Schools will be expected to fully integrate the revised learning area into their curriculum by the start of the 2020 school year.
Technology in The New Zealand Curriculum 2007
Technology in The New Zealand Curriculum has been restructured around three strands:
- Technological practice
- Technological knowledge
- Nature of technology
Each strand contributes to the “whole” of technological literacy.
A focus on technological literacy
Students gain comprehensive technological literacy through developing their technological knowledge and their understanding of the nature of technology, alongside and within their technological practice.
Learn more: Technology Online: Technological literacy
The revised strands
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Technological practice
Students undertake their own technological practice within a particular setting and reflect on the technological practice of others.
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Technological knowledge
Students learn how technological modelling supports decision making and how materials and systems enable technologies to function.
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Nature of technology
Students learn why technologies are developed in the way they are, and how technologies affect their – and others’ – views, attitudes, and lives.
Acknowledgement of specialist knowledge and skills
Learning in technology involves developing technological knowledge and capability. As students move from curriculum levels 6 to 8, they are presented with opportunities to develop specialist technological knowledge and skills.
Specialist knowledge and skills are aligned to contexts recognised as important to technology in New Zealand. These contexts include:
- resistant materials
- textiles
- food
- bio- and chemical technologies
- manufacturing
- design and visual communication
- digital media, digital infrastructure, programming, and computer science
- electronics
- digital information.
Last updated September 24, 2018