Digital Fluency Intensive - Session Six

 Enabling Access - Sites

Connectivity

Connectivity is one of the most critically important parts of being part of Manaiakalani; the sharing element of the pedagogy is only valuable when it generates, and creates interactions between the audience and the creator.

This kind of connectivity gives the students a great sense of empowerment that they are doing important work, and give them the ability to connect and engage with others around the country and world; I think this could be a great tool to break students out of a “local and personal” mentality, and get them to think , and learn about the wider world around them. This is critically important as students advance through schooling, and fits in nicely with the SOLO taxonomy idea of relationality, and the extended abstract (generating curiosity and making connections about the world around them)

Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu

 was a wonderful experience; making connections between our class, and other classes around the country to create a little community of sharing, and engaging with students from around the country, while also empowering students to be Cybersmart through the leaving of quality blog comments and engaging in online behaviour that elevates thinking, and positive actions.

Teaching Community

Creating a community of learning is also a really valuable tool for teachers, as we strengthen our practices by collaborating, and sharing the ideas which have worked well in our respective school communities allows us to create a robust learning curriculum for our students.

Manaiakalani Pedagogy focuses on building the Learn - Create - Share model by building towards the end goal of combining all of these elements, by taking clear steps to understand how each element works. 

Leading Learning Using Google Sites

Five affordances of Learn Create Share in a digital learning environment;

- Engagement

- Teaching conversations

- Cognitive challenge

- Visibility

- Scaffolding

Google Sites

We use Google sites to empower visible learning

Creates a ‘one stop shop’ for learning that is accessible anywhere, at any time, and gives students access to rewindable.

It allows us to personalise learning via multi-modal and multi-textual learning opportunities.

Creates visible links between planning, and learning; this transparency is important as it allows us to create connections between school home and community.

During uncertain times (covid) we have learning that is readily available, and creates a community for students who may feel disconnected while not at school.

My Site

Our class sites have been created in collaboration with the other teachers in our space to create a consistent theme; and ensure that navigation through the site is easy for students across our team.

As a group we contributed to a discussion document where we looked at and analysed different Learning Sites across the Manaiakalani clusters; some interesting points that bear focusing on;

Sites which are simple, and easy to navigate will create engagement as learning is easy to access and find.

Rewindable content for students to use is critical; offers them the opportunity to revisit and learn at their own pace.

Making sure that the site is up to date with current happenings, and ensuring that out-of-date links and unnecessary clutter gets removed once it is not needed.

Visual elements of the page cannot be understated as it creates engagement if the content LOOKS interesting to the students. This is especially important when we think about our less engaged students.

We took turns evaluating each other's sites; it was really interesting to see how other schools laid out their learning. I was particularly interested, based on my previous teaching experiences, with how this philosophy translated to secondary school level. I can see how critical rewindable learning is, particularly for longer-form assessments where students are required to complete work more independently.

Based on the feedback I was given from my site I have set goals to include more student-selected work options; to try to include more multi-textual options; and a wider choice of tasks to engage my learners to account for a variety of learning styles.