DFI Day 5: Collaborate - sites

Today was the perfect weather day for staying home and participating in another digital fluency intensive. The focus of today's sessions was on supporting visible teaching and learning through building collaborative, multimodal Google Sites.

The pedagogical content today was focused around 'visible/ariari' kaupapa. For such a long time success at school was really just the ability to read the teacher's mind and know what answers they wanted to hear. Research now tells us that making teaching and learning visible is a component of accelerating learning for our students. The use of a class site allows learning to be visible to our students and their whānau as well as a wider audience such as our colleagues. Within Manakalani they recognise that the default setting for teaching and learning is that it should be visible and therefore our attention should be on what do we make private as opposed to deciding what do we make public. Two further benefits of making teaching and learning visible are that it provides opportunities for student agency as well as fostering student independence. This independence importantly allows teachers to spend less time giving instructions and more time concentrating on improving learning.

Gerhard also shared some great links to Manaiakalani Google Class OnAir and a teaching as inquiry site that I would like to explore further.

The next part of the morning was focused around multimodal design. This is an area of passion for me and I have been developing my practice in this area for the past few years. The presentation was based around 4 priority goals. The first goal is engagement and relates directly to 'hooking' the students into learning. Kerry reminded me of how as teachers we are competing with modern-day technology such as social media therefore our visible learning needs to look exciting and cultivate the desirer to engage in learning.  When I first started working in a class with digital devices I quickly noticed that behaviour management took a back seat as my students were engaged like I had never seen before. The devices alone have not been enough to continue this focus as the novelty is wearing off for many students. This has been a timely reminder for me as I reflect on some of my challenging students.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a learning pedagogy that relates to mutlimodal design and is one that I was introduced to some years ago. I would like to revisit the area of UDL as it has slipt off my radar.

A large chunk of today's DFI was focused around creating a multimodal site page.  I decided to spend my time creating a site page around my classes technology topic. My goal for my site (which I am still developing) is to provide material to encourage children to engage in the design process. I have included a range of text from websites, the online reading platform Epic and Youtube. I have also been reflecting on including...
a clear and easy to follow layout
clear incorporation of learn, create, share
Engaging material that hooks
Allows for children to explore information independently
Makes my teaching and learning programme visible
Provides literacy that is wide and deep
Links to SAMR model

Below is a link to my newly created multi model site

Link to technology site