MIT 2023 - Site went live!

In the last block today the site went live, and I introduced it to Rooms 6,7,8 (all Year 6 classes) - there were some teething issues that arose like I needed to make sure that the site was not editable by everybody with the link - the students discovered this pretty quickly and a couple of them played around with the layout, so after a quick restore, and making sure all the new links were in place we started. A lot of the children chose to go for the easy MathVenture to start with, which I was not fussed about, I would like to see more of them go for the challenging texts, however, the tool is designed for self-selection, and students can progress through the difficulties at their own pace. 

One of the other issues that arose, that I was not able to diagnose on the spot was that some of the students found themselves unable to scroll down the page, while others were able to. I will have to figure out what was causing this issue and address it. 

The feedback from the students was overwhelmingly positive - they were excited to have more texts to take on, and I think what I will need is to find a time to regularly put out new ones - am thinking perhaps weekly, or fortnightly as I don’t want to over-promise and under deliver. I had a discussion with my team leader, who works with our lower-level literacy students, about the texts being more level-appropriate; she would like for the texts to be more readable, and perhaps shorter in length for the students at lower reading levels - we have students in our space who have reading ages of around 5-6 years of age, and even the easy texts were too long, and perhaps too difficult for them to make sense of and enjoy.

I will focus on the enjoyment element of it, as this is supposed to be engaging, and not a literacy-focused task - it is about unpacking the vocabulary. She also suggested that instead of having different word hyperlinks lead to the same page, and designed so that each hyperlink has a dedicated page of its own, for example, the “half” hyperlink leads to the same clarification as “share” rather than to a clarification of its own. She thought this would be a little confusing, I agree, however, I would also like for them to be able to see what other words can mean the same thing. Another comment was about having more images, and visual representation of the concepts to account for different learning styles. This will be time-consuming to set up, however, I can see real value in perhaps setting up separate clarification slides for each of the different difficulties, as the students taking on the easier challenges, and the students taking on the most difficult challenges are being linked to the same clarifications, some of which contain a great deal of writing on them. I still would like to limit each clarification to one slide per concept, as having to navigate through separate slides to find information can cause distractions and confusion, and take away from their flow as they move through the MathVenture. We have our MIT Online meets today, so perhaps I can use that to help with all of this.