Digital Fluency Intensive 2020 Day Five - Collaborate - Sites

The Manaiakalani Kaupapa for today was visible teaching and learning, which was led by Gerhard. The big question for us as teachers is "Can we see our teaching and learning?" This has come about because in the past our learning hasn't been visible and accessible. (The analogy was made that it was kind of like going through a maze.) There needs to be a clear insight into the whole learning journey and the young person needs to be at the centre. Online learning is accessible, available and in advance so we reduce the surprises. Digital technology makes our learning visible. The Hapara teacher dashboard, parent portals, Manaiakalani Google Class OnAir and Blogger are all solutions to making teaching and learning visible for our learners, whanau and colleagues.

Kerry then introduced us to the term multi modal learning which is how we receive communication in different ways (graphics, videos, texts, audio, etc). Teachers have to "sell the love of learning" by engaging the learner through a "hook" which will deepen the learner's understanding and accelerate progress. We looked at examples of multi modal learning sites at primary and secondary levels. With all this in mind, Venessa then took us through a deep dive into Google Sites and creating one from scratch!! We then broke into smaller groups to collaborate and share ideas and resources to create a multi modal site for our learners. Our group's theme was "Seeds" and I've created my own Google Site to use with my learners:

https://sites.google.com/paparore.school.nz/multimodalsite/home

The last session for the day was presented by Makaore who gave us some really good tips on how we can use blog share features such as personalising the reaction buttons, making use of labels and emailing a blog post to a friend outside of our cohort.

Today's learning about Google Sites has improved my capability as a professional and I look forward to creating new class sites to "keep my learning fresh and relevant year after year."