DFI Day Six Reflection

 Kia ora koutou, 

Connecting through learning blogs, toolkits, sites and professional learning networks:

Today we continued talking about making learning accessible and ubiquitous for all learners so they can access it anywhere, anytime and at any pace through using sites. Ensuring teaching and planning is visible to allow students to know where they are heading in their learning. It is also important to make sure that learning is rewindable which allows students to learn at their own pace and revisit learning. Visible planning and teaching on sites allows scaffolding for learners through rewindable learning. Another tip shared was using a 3 click rule throughout your site so it's easily accessible. 

On our Kea team site we enable access through using google slides that we embed on our site. 

Evaluating class sites:

We had some time to look through class sites and evaluate them based on two criteria:

• Visual appeal
• User experience

It was interesting seeing the difference especially between primary, intermediate and secondary class sites. It's also important to consider knowing your learners when creating your site as what works for one class may not for another. Also taking time to go through your class site with learners to ensure they know how to access their learning.

Our team site: 

We had to come up with three goals to achieve by the end of the today to improve our own sites. Mine were:

• Update buttons on Literacy page
• Update banners for each heading
• Give access to some files

I tried to make the banners photos specific to the learning area. I updated the literacy page buttons and removed some we haven't been using. I also went through our site on incognito mode and changed sharing settings to everyone can view. Here are some before and after shots I took of our team site:

Before:

After:

DFI Day Five Reflection

 Kia ora koutou, 

Today we talked about visible teaching and learning. For the whole journey to be visible for learners, whanau, the teacher and colleagues it needs to include the planning and learning intentions. This is because we want our learners to know what they are learning and where they are heading to next. 

In our team we do planning on slides that are accessible and visible on our learning site. 

Multi-Modal Learning 

This was good to re-visit as it is something we have been doing as part of our literacy programme this year through t-shaped literacy. I did an example of a multi-modal t-shaped literacy task during our first DFI session which you can find here. Multi-modal gives learners the opportunity to be critical thinkers, is choice based and gives student's the opportunity to collaborate. 

Throughout our distance learning our student's have been using a range of different tools to create and share their learning. Last week we gave student's a challenge to create a rocket; some student's made straw rockets, others drew them, some collaborated and worked on minecraft.

Google Sites

Today we collaborated to put resources together that we could then use to create our own learning site. My groups focus was on New Zealand and War. I planned to create a site based on Learn, Create, Share for the Musket wars, Treaty of Waitangi and the Land wars but it's a work in progress. So far I've only put some of it together for the Te Tiriti o Waitangi page. This will be a great resource for our school to use when we focus our inquiry on New Zealand history. 

Click on the screenshot above to check out my site