Digital Fluency Intensive - Week 6 blog post

Being home by yourself is no easy task, and I have to admit that I tend to avoid being faced with my loneliness by finding new projects to work on and creating new activities to keep my students engage. And as a result, it is possible that I might have forgotten to update my professional blog, again. Thank you, Phil, for reminding me!

This week was our sixth session of the Digital Fluency Intensive course for term 3 - this session's focus was enabling access.

During this session, I really enjoyed looking at different class sites across different age groups. It made me realised that was might be working for me this year in a year 2 class might not necessarily be working as well if I were to move to a higher year level at some stage. It also helped me reflect on what was working well with my site, and what needed to be improved.

However, I thought that the criteria we used to assess and give feedback on each other's sites might be a little subjective. As I was thinking before, different year levels will have different needs, and what might work in a class might not work in another class of a similar level. At the end of the day, I strongly believe that whatever it is that works best for your learners is what you should be focusing on as an educator. It does not mean that what one is using is perfect and shouldn't change. On the contrary, I think that if you start asking yourself the right questions, you might be able to improve the experience of the users who will be navigating the site. Instead of focusing on what you would like to see, why don't you ask your learners/ users what they need and want? Personally, I know that I loved getting feedback from my learners at the start of this term, it really helped me improved the way my site looked and it helped me make it easier for junior students to navigate. That being said, certain things will be true regardless of year level or personal preferences. Anyone (especially students!) would get discouraged by spending too much time looking for where their activity is located, whether it be because they had to click on too many links or whether they had to scroll for too long to get to the aforementioned activity. 

Regardless, I loved being able to look more in depths as the sites of my bubble group. We gave and received feedback on what our sites looked like at that point of the session, and then it was time for us to pick goals for us to work on, before our create session began.

This week's create session: enabling access (Google sites)

At first, I had my heart set on reorganising bits and bobs on my class site. But as I thought more about how I could improve it, I realised that it might not be the best choice with us being in lockdown. Our class site is working really well as it is, students are familiar with it and able to navigate it without any support. If I were to change it, I would rather do it in term 4 when we are back in the classroom and I can teach my students how to use the updated version.

As a result, I  decided to create little mini-sites for my t-shaped units (before this session, my t-shaped units were all part of my main class site,  but I realised that this was probably not as ideal as I originally thought it would be).

There will, however, be no "before and after" picture. With my students being familiar with how to use the links that are currently available on our site, I have decided not deleted those, but I thought that there had to be an easier for me to share these sites with the rest of my team. I then decided that this was not enough, so I ended up creating an extra google site to link all the multi-modal sites I have already created this year, including a link to the template I am using to create these sites. Here is the link in case you would be interested in checking them out - just be aware that some are still under construction.

During today's session, I also managed to finish a new multimodal site, this time integrating a report from google studio which will update itself every time students (or special guests!) fill in our google form with their pepeha. I've added another section this time, in order for other people to fill in their pepeha as well (support staff, family members, students from other classrooms or other schools, etc. If you are interested in checking out what the final result is, I invite you to check out our Te Wiki o te Reo Māori site. 

I couldn't help but feel sad for not having had the opportunity to have a good before and after photo montage. I know that this wasn't really the aim of this session, but I couldn't help myself to have just a little bit of a play with Google Data Studio. I thought that using cards would be a good way to display students' writing, but in the end, I wasn't entirely convinced of the way it looked. But then, my world opened up once I realised I could use my basic knowledge of HTML and CSS to improve the way it looked and adjust it to fit my needs. I am feeling pretty happy with the results, but I might try and see if I can improve this further later on. My students have been telling me that these reports are really motivating them to submit their work, so I know I will be putting in an extra effort to create these sorts of reports whenever I can.

Unfortunately, my internet connection was impacted by the DDOS attack: I was left unable to keep on having fun with today's create session. I will have to update our class' padlet in my own time to make our sharing more visible... Stay tuned, or head to our class blog for more updates on this. Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed this DFI session, which was more hands-on, as I found the opportunity to work on our class sites really useful (especially with Auckland still being in lockdown for now).