Digital Fluency Intensive - Week 5 blog post

Yesterday was our fifth session of the Digital Fluency Intensive course for term 3 - this session's focus was collaborate & Google Sites.

During this session, we kept on diving deeper into the Manaiakalani's Learn, Create, Share pedagogy, with our main focus being on class sites, multimodal planning and visible learning. When I was busy creating my class site earlier this year, I did want my home page to be quite minimalistic but I also wanted it to give users an easy window to guide them through navigating the site. After yesterday's session, I can say I resonated with the idea that class sites are an extension of our physical classroom. And this is really true! 

I teach a lovely Year 2 class, with a 1:2 iPad ratio. Both at the end of term 2 and at the start of term 3, I started running workshops to teach my students how to use and navigate our class site. It has been really useful for me as well, as I was asking them to tell me what wasn't really working and what they found challenging. I have been able to adapt my site to my students' needs, and most of them find it really easy to navigate. Even though I have not been able to go through every learner before the country moved back to alert level 4., I was confident that most of my students already knew their way around our site.

Once we head back into school (hopefully soon 🤞), my goal is to help my students utilise the digital skills that they have been learning and to integrate these more into my classroom program.

I find working on creating a Google Site quite soothing and relaxing, and I feel like I can really try and get creative with my ideas, and I really enjoyed today's 'create' activity. I loved getting the opportunity to look at the way other junior multimodal sites were organised, it gave me a lot of new ideas. At the moment, I have created all my T-Shaped Literacy units as different subpages. I am trying to decide whether I like the idea of having multiple sites more, or whether I prefer doing it this way. For this year, I will probably be sticking to creating these units within my class site as this is what my students are used to, but let's see how things go.

But today's 'create' activity was about more than creating a new Google Site: it was about working collaboratively with other teachers on finding texts relating to a theme (our group's theme was friendship). We then used these resources to each create our own multimodal site on the topic.

Here is the link to the multimodal site I created today: click here to learn more about kindness.

Back when I used to play with Blogger as a teenager, I remember that it was indeed possible to embed a website into a blogpost. I have tried my best at using the iframe HTML tag, but to no luck. Maybe that is no longer possible? I'll definitely have to do some googling on that one. But don't mind me being me, I digress...

After attending a google meet on T-Shaped Literacy back in term 1, I have started giving multimodal planning a go this year. I have only done a couple of units so far (you can check some of them over here if you are interested), but really I am still just figuring it out as I go along. My students have really been enjoying these units though, and I am currently working on two units for my kids to enjoy this lockdown.

I loved being reminded about the multi-text database. We did get introduced to it back in term 1, but I had completely forgotten it even existed! I spent a bit of time creating my own ones, which I really enjoyed, and I might take some time to add them to the database once I am happy enough with them. Sharing is caring, and I love working collaboratively with others. This is also one of our core values at New Windsor School!