Collaborative teaching and learning using a Class Site

Collaboration

Introduction

I found today's session on Collaboration incredibly helpful and informative. I am using my class site a lot at the

moment and have been increasingly more frustrated in the way I was organising my learning and tasks. Today

we spent a large part of the day understanding and developing sites that were really successful. We looked into

Multi-modal, multi-level and and multi- text. It all made perfect sense and fitted in well with my developing digital

pedagogy. Using the questions below I intend on expanding on the ideas, issues, challenges and solutions raised

today when exploring Google Site.

Questions and Answers:

• What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Today we looked at how Class sites can be used. It challenged me to rethink how I will use my class site and how I will endeavor this term to used multiple sites to share learning, planning and teaching across the curriculum areas. It is so exciting to be able to use a simple forum such as Sites to teach cross curricular, multi-level, multi-cognitive and easy to access for students and parents.

Earlier in the day we discussed how important it is to limit the links and how the students must be able to access learning without passwords, persimmon and without receiving an email telling them what to do. As I am in the middle of planning for my Term 2 learning, almost guaranteed to be mainly online without access to my classroom, I needed to hear this advice. We spent time building a site on one topic - our group looked at Mars. Our whole Site was on one topic. This site could be linked to another "Class Site" as a period of learning. This was so exciting for me. I hadn't until this point realised how Sites could be used in a multi-leveled way. I have also realised that this would be a more efficient way to plan also. I usually use Google Slides but it makes much more sense to link in another Site for teacher planning and use the learning site for planning solely for the students to see.

We spent time in our smaller group designing a site. We noticed the most success sites were the ones that had very little scrolling required and all the links were there. I am not sure if the normal templated could be manipulated to look like this but the person that created the best site changed all the sizes of the boxes himself. Things to remember when doing this is you would want to have a unified colour scheme and font and font size. You would have to plan out your boxes first before starting the designing process so you could see what would work and what wouldn't. I am really looking forward to changing things around on my sight and hopefully having a smoother, more powerful and fun learning experience for my students.

• What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

Managing my planning using Sites and linking things in when required. It made so much more sense and cut out a lot of double handling and made the planning more meaningful.

This idea could also be used for recording data and comparing trends. You could link in Sheets and have everything in the one place for the particular area you are working on. For example you could have a writing site linked to your class site. This writing site could have everything the student needs for the task and behind that could be the things the teacher needs to measure learning, monitor progress, collect student voice, share data, information, successes and concerns with SENCO etc.

• What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  

I have finally learnt how to use Screencastify! This will be a great tool to share with my learners. I also have been introduced to new things like Canva, Flipgrid, Padlet and our MultiText Sheet. All of these things I need to have a play around with more but I can see them all being helpful. The MultiText Sheet was just absolutely amazing. I think if we all made a commitment to add just one thing per term there would be such a wealth of learning resources available to our group.

• What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

I really need to just make time and practice. I think planning for Term 2 will help with that but just trying new things and reaching out to the facilitators for help when I get stuck. I will make the commitment to share with my team what I have and ask for feedback. I feel like I have so much to learn and you don't know what you don't know. I am really enjoying the pace of the sessions. It definitely isn't easy but it is interesting. I feel this week went really well and last week I feel like I would like a recap session on some of those test questions around Google Sheets.

Here is the link to my Mars site. It really needs to be less scrolly but I enjoyed trying new things on it.

Mission to Mars This is a link to a page we put all our sites on. I hope this shares ok because it will be so helpful to look at others learning. List of test sites.

Conclusion

Thank you for taking the time to read my post today. I really am very excited about what we learnt today. I feel like we are going to have a great start to the term with building my digital fluency. The students will directly benefit from all of the mahi we are putting and it is so exciting. I really feel like I have transitioned into a new stage of teaching and passion for my job has just been taken to the next level. Thank you everyone for your support and guidance.