Collaborate Sites DFI Course - 2nd June 2021

Day 5 DFI Course - Ohaeawai School 

Our Manaiakalani pedagogy focus for today was around the kaupapa aspect of teaching and learning being visible. The foundation of this idea was, can you see it or can you not? Dorothy shared the idea that sometimes our learners fail in the school system because we have spent so much time hiding the learning journey from the students themselves.

She also asked "what have you done to lay out the learning journey for your students this week?" This was an interesting idea to reflect on. Dorothy talked about how Google Sites became the one stop shop for making teaching and learning visible for everyone. This is something that we would learn more about through the day. Many aspects of this korero linked to the idea that there are no surprises when everything is visible. Dorothy also touched on the research done by John Hattie around visible learning for teachers. 

Our next session was around mutlimodal learning. One key idea that I reflected on most was the need to engage learners and hook them into their learning. I think this is a foundational idea of effective teaching and learning in any class. Differentiation and personalised learning was an important part of this as we know we can't engage all learners in the same way all of the time. 

Kerry talked about how the homepage of a google site is like a shop window. We want the audience to want to explore our sites. We looked at some examples of presenting information in traditional formats vs multimodal formats and how this can drastically change the level of engagement and student agency. 

We had a chance to explore some different google sites from a range of year levels. Some of the sites were really aesthetically pleasing and it made me want to make some changes to my own class site. 

Our next session was about creating a google site from scratch. I have already created one for my class so I have played around with this over the past year. It was a great refresher on how to create a site and what to keep in mind when doing so. Vicky also recapped the importance of creating a google site that entices your audience to want to look more at your site.

We then looked at a multi text database which showed content around T shaped literacy. This was interesting because I have heard this mentioned many times since moving to the Far North, but I didn't have any knowledge around what this actually was. We had a slide deck available that we could look at which outlined the theory behind T shaped literacy. We explored some of the themes on the database and chose one that we wanted to create a multi modal site to be based on. 

We planned our site either on paper or on Jamboard. Here is my initial layout plan for my site. The layout changed a lot when I actually started making my site. 

I found some stories and articles that children could read, watch or listen to and added them to my site. I tried to ensure that my site was in line with the T shaped literacy theory and had main, complimentary, scaffolding and challenging texts. 

Here is the link to my multimodal site