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