DFI Workshop 6 - Visibility and Evaluating Sites

Earlier this morning Dorothy presented the idea of making teaching and learning visible.

Why is this important? Here are some key reasons why:

1. Children who have access to their learning via an effective class site are more likely to achieve better results. Children need to know what they are meant to be learning and why.

2. Sharing of teacher inquiry online helps other teachers to improve their overall teaching practice. Therefore the quality of the teaching profession overall is boosted because of the sharing of quality ideas, resources, exemplars and learning.

3. Barriers are removed so that families/whanau can access/view children's learning.

In 2013 famous rapper and musician WILL.I.AM visited our Manaiakalani community of learning because of our visibility and high profile online. He donated $100k to support learning in our Manaiakalani schools.

Goal 1: To make my site more visible. I went incognito online to double check that all my documents etc were visible as some were not.

Goal 2: To make my site more multi-modal: I am planning to include more images and movies etc with less text to make my site more appealing for my audience.

During our 'Deep Dive' session we looked at many different add on programmes that can support our teaching and learning. I think that I will explore 'Sandbox' a little more to see how it can support movie making at our school.

 

The next thing we looked at was evaluating sites for leading learning. We looked at each others sites and used a google form to evaluate each site. It was quite nerve wracking to be assessed by my peers but surprisingly I received quite a few positive comments. It was interesting to see what others have done with their sites. The main thing is that we need to make it appealing, visible, and easy to access.

I spent a little bit of time working on improving my class site.