DFI Day 6 Reflection

Connected - Rangitāmiro what brings us together? Connected learners share. Digital has enabled us to keep in touch with others. Shared language enables us to make connections. Connections happen as a network when there are structures in place. 

Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu Fiona Grant spearheads this for Manaiakalani. As a school that is part of Manaiakalani, we keep in touch with other schools in our cluster via our class and student blogs. My class leave comments for a bilingual class Room 4 at Otahuhu Primary School and the Tuatara Class up North. We try to leave blog comments on their posts fortnightly. It's been very cool to see learners connect via blogs.

Leading Learning using Google Sites - I've been using Google sites since my teaching career at Pt England School. However, there was a time when I didn't because at one school didn't use them - they used Hero. For me personally, I enjoy using sites with my learners. However, I feel that it's a bit of a mess at the moment. I need to tidy it up and make it better. I don't think my class site is visible on our school sites page.  I have also reflected on how I need to get feedback from my learners and what they think. I liked how Vicki said that there's a 3 click rule for learners to access the sites. Here is the link to my current class site (apologies my site has now changed).

In my class site my goals are to: 1). jazz up my buttons. I will change these when I take photos of my learners and stage it that way. 2) Fix up the navigation so my learners have 3 or less clicks to access their learning. 3). Make sure my slides and work I've created and shared is visible to visitors. I also added a very brief statement about myself and my picture at the bottom of my site so people know I am the kaiako (teacher) in this class site. I created a banner for my class site and changed it. I checked all my pages and checked the view. I tidied up my writing page for our spellathon. I've also changed the theme from the greeny blue to a charcoal grey. Here are some pictures of the changes that I've made.

I'm happy with the changes I've made to my site. I am going to design a form to gather some feedback from my learners about the class site and hopefully make some changes accordingly. I learned a few things from looking at other sites and hope to implement some of the changes on my class site. Here's some very kind feedback from a few students from my class.