DFI Collaborate - Sites

Its hard to believe that this is session 5 out of 9. Another day filled with lots of tips and new learning. I was really looking forward to today's session on sites. During the lock down, I started creating a site for my learners. I had a great time playing, adding, deleting, adding again, changing and looking at others learning sites for ideas. I was excited to get ideas and tips from the experts today so that I could revamp my site and make it usable, visible and engaging for my class.

Manaiakalani

The hot topic today to connect with Manaiakalani was Visible. The word kind of explains it self. Connecting that to teaching though was new to me. Making sure that every aspect of the teaching and learning process should be visible to children, parents, the teacher and the other staff. In the past I have always had a planning book on my desk that could be seen by my team leader and relievers to see what was happening each day. Since being at Edmund Hillary School I have had to put all my planning on Google Drive. I have struggled with this and thought no one can see what I am doing and if a reliever had to come in they wouldn't know what my day is like or what would be happening on that particular day. I have since realised  this it is in a shared folder and all staff can see my planning. And I can see theirs. So I had a wee nosy at what plans and templates were happening across the school. I found most had a different template to the one I was using (One that I had created many years ago and has always worked for me). I found out it is expected that everyone uses this template. This highlighted for me that when starting in a new school you don't know what you don't know! So having plans visible in this way makes so much sense. I know am using the school template for my planning. Still struggling to get use to it but will get there.

Manaiakalani have four key goals on making teaching and learning visible through multi modal sites

• Engagement (the hook) how is the class site drawing in the learner, like a shop window draws in shoppers. Children engage in different ways so having a variety of ways to engage the learners is key. It must also reflect what is happening 'today'. 
• Personal learning
• Acceleration
• Empowerment

And making every part of learning visible is important from planning, the processes, the outcomes and some assessment data.

Visible teaching should be

• accessible
• available
• and done in advance.

Google Sites

I liked seeing that the things I had been playing around with during lock down, when I was creating my own site, were the things that we were learning to do. So I am feeling confident I know how to create a great site for my class! Here is a link to the practice site with a few simple things like videos, picture carousel, headings, and buttons.

My practice site.

T Shaped Literacy

It was good to have a wee run down on T Shaped Literacy. We started discussing this at a staff meeting and some of the teachers are already in the process of creating these and using in their classes. I had a fair understanding of it but was good to get some more info and see some examples of how the final product looks when you start using it with the children in the class.

We then had time to play with this idea and link it all together in a site.

Here is the one I created for the practicing of this.

Link here.

This is just a home page with a link to a mock up reading page with a group. Then a link to the slide with my attempt to use the T Shaped Literacy for a reading group. 

A nice wee tool that we were introduced to for the planning of this was Jam Board. It was quite helpful and I can see some uses for it in the classroom. 

Summary

My blog does not reflect the whole picture of what was happening in today's session. There was an awful lot of learning and tips but I have just added the key points so that I can get back now to creating slides and T Shaped Literacy ideas for my class. I also want to completely redo my class site that I started in lock down and make it more multi modal for engaging all the learners in my class.