Week 6 - Enabling Access - Sites

Being connected

The ability to connect is extremely powerful and being able to go digital has made such a difference for us personally as well as a school community. We all know how important it is to connect with our students. This is another layer of being able to do this especially in terms of what has happened this year with the lockdowns. However, we can be thankful for the richness that having the ability to connect through Google Meet has bought to our relationships with some of the students and their families.

Here we are on a Google Meet during the lockdown.

Being part of the manaiakalani group brings a different dimension to making connections with other teachers. It strengthens our professional relationship and builds collegiality. The shared language of "learn, create, share" brings us closer together as well but it does need to be a two-way street and there are lots of opportunities to share, e.g. toolkits, cluster sites, twitter feeds etc. that we can use.


Why use a Google site?

A well developed and thought out site will contribute to causing accelerated shift!
It is a -
- Purposeful approach to the visibility of teaching.
- Can provide rich multimodal opportunities
- Allows a degree of student choice and collaboration
- Empowers learners that can access learning at any time

A few things to consider on a google site is the consistency across the school, how visually appealing it is and to make sure that it functions well.

Evaluation of sites
We then looked at a number of sites as well as looking closely at our own studio site. My goals for this session was to make sure that the site was inviting, to check all the links, to embed slide shows instead of using the raw link and to check with my studio team as it is our website for our learners.
Studio Site


Hapara hot tip
Student dashboard - great tool to introduce to the Year 7/8 and upwards. Learners have the power of seeing what their own workflow looks like!

SPAM
Get this under control by marking any obscene comment as 'spam' and follow the process to try to reduce any unwanted comments on our blogs.

DFI Week 5 - Collaborate - sites

This week we looked at Collaborate.
To me this means sharing and being able to see things that we need to see to grow our learning. I really like the idea that learning is a journey for all of us and that we learn as much from our failures as we do from our successes. Troubleshooting is such a valuable opportunity so instead of seeing it as an inconvenience, see it as an opportunity.

Visible Teaching and Learning
Visible is something you can see! Very simple!
It needs to be visible to our students as well as the whānau and our colleagues - this is what it means to be collaborative! We need to open up the learning journey for our students and their whānau so that they know what is going on, we have equity and more success. We need to make it less like a maze and more obvious for them without the barriers of passwords or permissions.

Multi-Modal
This is the lynch-pin to teaching and learning online. It needs to take into account all the different learning styles and preferences when designing our learning sites. We need to cater to all the different students, have a differentiated approach, and learning needs to be rewindable.

Hapara Hot Tip #4
Make sure that the "sharing" tab is empty. The students should be filing their documents in the right place every time they do something. Children should not make folders as we lose visibility.


MultiText Data Base
We need to engage our readers and this is a way to do it. T-shaped literacy needing eyes on text. We need to go 'wide' and 'deep'. Going 'wide' by engaging the students to look at a variety of texts as well as going deep into the main text that you need the students to read.

I think that this way of planning reading is really engaging for our learners. We use a google slide to structure the reading for the week but I think we can go even deeper and wider using the ideas from this data base as well as adding to it.

Google Sites
It is really important that what we do digitally needs to work for our learners. They need to be hooked into their learning, be able to access what we are providing for them digitally which means that our sites need to be clear and simple.

Learning on our sites needs to be engaging, personalised, accelerative for students, and empowering for our students.
So what is important?
THE HOOK! We need to hook students in and draw them into the learning and this is competing with the all the other things in the digital environment. Our site needs to be a dynamic place with students wondering what is on there today and being motivated to go and have a look.
This is the site that I made today.
Reading Site

DFI Week 4 - Dealing with Data

Today we looked at ways to use data to inform us about our learners, ways to collect and organise data, as well as how important the 'share' part is in the cycle of 'Learn, Create, Share.'

 The Hapara hot tip showed us how to easily see which of our students had their blog posts commented on and how long ago. This will help to focus our commenting to make sure there is an even spread as well as see who has made a blog post recently and who may need help with this.

Share. The ability to share using the digital platform is enhanced by its speed and amplification. It is our natural inclination to want to share and being able to do this digitally means there is a global audience. Getting to the 'share' stage of the 'learn, create, share" cycle is important as it acknowledges that a piece of learning has been finished. This is an important life skill and is also often a starting place for new learning.

Why Blogger?

- Its functionality is similar to other social media platforms.
- Its legality, systems and security.
- It has the same google sign in.
- It has the 3 check system.
- Its large audience.
- It uses the same platform for both teachers and learners.


 Google Forms - This was a good refresher for me on remembering to use Google forms to get information from the students. I think it will be a very useful tool to use for gathering data, such as finding our prior knowledge about a topic, using forms as follow up reading activities to gague understanding of texts and getting the students to create their own google form to show what they know by creating surveys and tests for others.

    My maps - I think this will be a very engaging tool that the students will love to explore and create with. It would be very useful as students will be able to show their understanding about a place and with the ability to add information and pictures it.

I have always dreaded google sheets and in the past had forced myself to use them as they suited the majority of my team and allowed us to have a lot of information in one place. After today I feel a lot more confident about using them.
Top Tips
- Lock your rows and columns by hovering over the thick lines in the top first cell of the sheet  until you see the hand and then select what you would like to lock.
- Select multiple cells by clicking on the first cell and then going to the end cell and holding down shift before clicking.
- Resizing - select all rows or columns that you want to resize and then use the arrow to drag it to size.
- Drag handle - this is useful to put the same formula into multiple consecutive rows or columns.
- Hide rows or columns to protect information.
- Protect parts of a document so that they can not be changed.
- Explore tool to get other charts.
- Click chart to make 3 dots appear in top right-hand corner - option to move to own sheet.


Using data to make meaning ...
Using data to analyse student or class blogs to create a sense of ownership and accountability about how much you are blogging. You can look at visitors to your page and even track who is visiting on My Maps. This would be fantastic learning for any student. Here I looked at Candice's blog and analysed her average monthly blogging total.

DFI Week 3 - Media

Today we talked about how important the 'create' opportunities in the learning environment are to students and that often this is the part that gets left behind. We need to refocus on this aspect of learning.

It's all about the HOOK and engaging our students so that they find the academic side of things exciting both behaviorally and cognitively. Young people want to create, and this is what excites and empowers them.

"Creative skills help students become better problem solvers, communicators, and collaborators."

Dorothy reminded us about a documentary called 'The heART of the matter' which I have watched before. I remember how inspired I felt, how ripped off I felt because that was not my school experience and the questions it raised as to how I could do this for my current students. I want my students to be saying things like, "... school is wonderful and I just want to be there." I know this is a good conversation to have with my team to see what opportunities we can create for our students to become better problem solvers, communicators, and collaborators.

 The Harpara hot tip helped me realise how to drag priority learners to the forefront. Also creating groups will be very useful in our studio when we are working specifically with our literacy or maths groups. This will make it easier to see what they are doing and use the guided session a little better.

I became familiar with google draw during lockdown while trying to create presentations for students that they could complete at home but it was very dependent on what device they had access to and when we got back to school I found out that you could not access this on the iPads. So it went to the back of my mind. But trying again today I think it could be a very useful tool and I am going to try and find out how to utilise it more in the studio.

I think it could be a very useful tool for a creative activity based around our science learning making Battle-vore cards as we learn about habitats and foodchains.

I think the main thing that I realised about 'media' is how much we use it in our studio and how useful it is to help with making learning more engaging for our students. What they can see in a well thought out and presented video is ten times more engaging than listening to the teacher drone on about the same things, plus they can do it in their own time and rewind it whenever they need to.

Today I learned how to add the whistles and bells to the slideshows that we use for independent learning in our studio. I can now easily add sound. video and hyperlinks to our slideshows making the learning more accessible, rewindable, and engaging.



I also learned about creating a playlist in YouTube. We use a lot of YouTube clips to hook our learners into our writing, inquiry, and maths by putting the video into our Google Slide deck but the problem was that all the ads and other, sometimes more interesting, videos popped up enticing them away from the intended viewing. I will be using the playlist feature more to see if we can stop this from happening.