Digital Fluency Intensive 2020 Day Six - Enabling Sites

The Manaiakalani kaupapa for today was all about teachers and students being connected in the digital world. Dorothy spoke about how we can find out where our students are in their learning (and this has been particularly important during lockdown where we have been able to support the well-being of our students). Digital technology also enables us to reach out and connect to a powerful network of teachers within our wider community through clusters, Manaiakalani outreach programmes, toolkits online, mailouts, Blogger, Twitter, Google + community, etc. Connected learners SHARE through blogging in positive, thoughtful and helpful ways. We are being empowered by being connected; when exchanging ideas we are being effective teachers which accelerates learning for our students. And one of the final slides that I really liked was the jigsaw puzzle that showed us that by implementing this kaupapa it requires all four elements of being connected, empowered, ubiquitous and visible. Maximum effectiveness is achieved when all four goals are genuinely occurring.

So today our main goal was to evaluate sites created by other teachers. Gerhard led us through a chalk 'n talk session and referred us to the slide about the "purpose of a learning site". Kerry then took us on a deep dive where we had the opportunity to critique learning sites at a variety of levels. The most important features of a learning site are visual appeal and user experience (functionality/ease of access in 2-3 clicks). After looking at these I was able to jot down lots of ideas that I wanted to implement in our class site. I set myself quite a few goals:
1) to add round buttons as I thought this was more "kid friendly"
2) to add a colourful timetable so parents can see what we do in our daily programme
3) to add the groups for reading, writing and maths
4) to have less writing as this would make our learning site more "kid friendly"
5) to add our long term planning
6) to add the learning progressions for reading (the reading rocket), writing and maths so parents can see what their child's goals are
7) to add our email addresses under our teacher photographs
8) to rename and re-order the tabs at the top of our class site to "tidy things up"

As one teacher in my digital bubble group said "that's quite a lot to do in one day, Michelle!" So I'm looking at this as more of a long term plan! I was a bit nervous about sharing my screen because our learning site is a collaborative one that I didn't actually have any part in creating because I've only been at my current school for a year. However, I felt we got some good feedback which helped me to know what to prioritise on my big list of goals! For me I only really started looking and using our class site during the lockdown so I had to learn pretty quickly how to add, edit and delete material. This is where DFI has been timed perfectly. I really enjoyed getting the time to make things "pretty". So today (and over the next few days) I have made a start adding our school logo on every page, adding a photo to the banner on each page, changing fonts, making some new buttons and I have added an Eye Dropper extension so I could take the colour from our school logo and add this to our learning site.

I'd love to have some feedback on our class learning site please!
https://sites.google.com/paparore.school.nz/tewharekiwisite2020/home