Enabling Access - DFI Session 6

The theme of today's DFI session was enabling access through visibility. Particularly fitting as we are three days into term 2 where students are learning from home and teachers are teaching from home due to our nationwide lockdown!

While the Ministry of Education have put in place supports for those students who don't have access to devices and internet connections (such as home learning packs and Papa Kāinga TV), I feel confident that the majority of my 27 learners will be able to utilise the class site access their learning for as long as they need to be at home.

Over the school holidays I had been tossing between how I was going to structure my class site so that it would be visually appealing and user friendly (particularly for my Year 4 students who are in their first year of being in a chromebook class and have had their devices for less than 7 weeks!). I made the decision to have a page for each curriculum area so that I could get as much relevant learning content out to students... needless to say it was an epic fail! There was too much content and the feedback that I received from some parents was that they weren't sure what their child needed to complete. Judging by the number of students who completed tasks, I think it's also fair to say that even they were confused about what they needed to do too!

Yesterday I explored some of the class sites from other teachers at my school. Interestingly enough I found that a first year provisionally registered teacher had achieved in her site exactly what I wanted for my own class site. It was both visually appealing and easy to navigate - both for her Year 2 & 3 ipad learners and their whānau. I emailed her to praise and acknowledge her efforts, as well as give her a heads up that I was going to revamp my class site using her one as a model! Her response was that she had looked at my class and initially borrowed some ideas from it - evidence that making our class sites visible and being open to sharing what we are doing helps enable all of us to be highly effective practitioners.

Taking the time to examine my colleagues' class sites during today's DFI sessions was a worthwhile task as it provided me with some other ideas for how I can create make my site visually engaging. It is also challenged me to consider the functionality of the class site (no more than 3 clicks), the nature of tasks (using the SAMR model, providing multi-modal and multi-textual resources, student choice and opportunities for collaboration) and ensuring that rewindable learning is available (the latter being incredibly important right now while distance learning is in place).

Gerhard's slide (from the Chalk'n Talk session - Leading Learning using Google Sites) sums up nicely what it is that I want to achieve with my class site.

My goal for today was to create a specific distance learning page for each week. It's still a work in progress, but I'm pretty pleased with how things are shaping up. I even managed to create a button so that it's super easy for my learners to access this week's and next week's content. I use bitmojis a lot with our start of day activities (SODA tasks) so thought this would be a fun visual for my learners.

I wish I'd had the foresight to take a video of my site before I started making the changes. Here's a short clip of the home page of my class and how it's currently looking.



My next step for this home page is to tidy up the buttons at the bottom of the page. At present I think they are really clunky looking. I'd also like to add an introduction video for those kids who haven't engaged with our google Meet sessions this week. Once we're back in the classroom I'd also like to get some photos of my learners and use them as a backgrounds for the learning area buttons.

Over the next week I'd also like to get some feedback from learners about how the site is working for them. The site still has a long way to go, but I have a clear vision and "recipe for success" which will help me to design a site that is relevant, engaging and easily accessible for my learners and their whānau.

Stay tuned for an update on how everything turns out!