Enabling Access by suping up sites

We explored how to maximise our class/subject sites to maximise visible teaching and learning.

Evaluating Class Sites:

We explored a selection of Class sites looking at the two key criteria of:

• Visual appeal - shop window!
• User experience - easy to locate ‘stuff’ (2/3 clicks)

considering what works well and what doesn't work well.

Colour checker - put a link to your site and it will analyse points to consider.

Visible Kaupapa

Making teaching and learning visible... essentially can you see it or not? We aren't necessarily talking about John Hattie's work as he takes it to a whole new level which becomes quite complicated. Manaiakalani simplifies this. It's visible not only to learners but to whanau too.

FAIL - so much of the learning journey has traditionally been hidden from the akonga. Dorothy likens it to an adult version of a maze where you can only see a little bit in front of you.

It used to be that those that succeeded were the ones able to read the teachers mind. Those who had an element of cultural capital. When success criteria are open and displayed it opens up the learning journey and makes it visibly accessible. We can take it a lot further still with the intentional use of digital tools. Every step of the journey should be visible.

When we say that the default is visible, what genuinely needs to be invisible or private?

Biodata (Date of birth etc), Health info, Behavioural data etc... sure, however what about assessment info? Five-year-olds know where they sit in relation to their peers. How precious do we need to be? We need to open our minds up about what genuinely must be kept private.

We've been using google sites to repurpose our learning since 1:1 classes began.

Making teaching visible removes the element of surprise for learners and whanau. It provides an advance warning as well as rewind ability afterwards.

Hapara's tagline is Making Teaching and Learning Visible. This is exactly what we are wanting to do. Effectively it enables us to be able to access the children's desk.

Hapara Parent Portal. DO our parents have the ability to access this?

Manaiakalani Google Class On Air

Stalk some teachers and see what it's like. At the end of this term, the applications for 2020 come online. Is this something we can get done down here? I'm seriously considering "stepping into the arena".

Visible Teaching as Inquiry

Having them open and visible across the clusters to access and learn from others, just like our learners. We stress the power of feedback and feedforward for our learners on their blogs. Do we do this ourselves with our own learning as professionals?

This connection only came about because they were visible online in a positive light for learning. A number of people argued that other communities were more impoverished/deserving, however, they didn't have a digital footprint.

Data shows that if a child is present over three years in a Manaiakalani School... the rate of gain in writing was twice that expected nationally. This means that these students on average made one more year's progress above the expected rate per year if they were there for three years.

A concern that when kids go digital, we lock parents out of our children's learning. Schools can create barrier systems to prevent ease of parents being able to find what they have been doing. By making everything visible and making it so that there is no problem with it being visible then we are keeping it open.

Leading Learning using a Google Site

An overview of setting up a class or subject site.

We need to consider the learners' pathways. It all needs to be connected so that kids find it easier to use when transitioning between classes and year levels.

When creating a new site... the first consideration is who are the learners? A site for Chromebook users is very different than a site that is for iPad users. Why are they using the site? What are the key things they are going to go to?

Think really carefully about Colour... you can you tools to pluck out colour from uniforms etc. Do the combinations make your eyes hurt? DO they look okay when viewed on different screens?

Consider Layout... how easy is it on your eye? There's a lot to be said for clutter-free.

It's important to think about using a consistent font. Try not to use more than two. This goes for the things that you are embedding too. Google has begun to include Lexend fonts, which are meant to increase productivity. You can see that they are rather boring though...

The 3 click rule is very important. You should be able to get to anything within 3 clicks.

Purposeful Learning Tasks:

We need to consider how we can ramp up the learning task to utilise the tools available. It's not always "What can we do better?" but how can we redefine the way we are doing things to make it more purposeful and authentic.

For ERO etc, it's very easy to copy sites, so even if you are going to use the same site, it's a good idea to make a copy of it so that it archives everything nicely.

Feedback on our Group Sites

We provided a link to our class site. We received down and dirty feedback. Well... that was the theory. Everyone was actually rather kind. To be fair, many in the room are only starting out with their class sites, so a few kinks were still being ironed out. Ours, on the other hand, are humming as they should be. One of the things that have been frustrating me about mine is the clutter of rewindable learning. I had developed a bad habit of just "dumping" DLO's at the bottom f the page. They were there and rewindable, but the shop window was in disarray! Certainly not providing a visually appealing visual appearance to engage learners.

My feedback from the group was too "nice":

"It looks great. Thanks for sharing Mel."

"Well done Mel. I liked your simple layout and it is easy for children to use."

"Looks great Mel. I like the cleanness and few steps the kids have to go to."

There was nothing I could use to set a goal for my class site for the day. I needed to come up with three specific things I wanted to achieve on my site today. My focus is on User engagement.

• Cleaner pages 
• rewindable learning is clearly marked as per term.
• Less “busy-ness"
• I need it to be more engaging (insert magic wand of inspiration here)
• More “extra’s for expert” for kids to do at home.

I managed to clean a large portion up. It's much tidier and more user-friendly. I still need to be mindful of upping the engagement factor.

I finally got some links in there for literacy. I can just keep adding to this now... meaning kids have a place to go to when they are looking for "Homework" to do.

Sunshine Books:

Manaiakalani gets free copies of Sunshine books, to coincide with the online subscription. There are a huge wealth of resources out there to coincide with them.

Game changers:

Shift + Z - creates a ghost file in a different place.

100-word challenge: put a google form with a picture prompt in. You can then pull them off easily.
Google form: find me an interesting fact.