DFI - Reflection - Day 6 - Enabling Access - Sites

Connection. A fundamental part of the Manaiakalani kaupapa. It feeds into our need to share with others about our lives, and our tamariki sharing their work. Our look at sites today brought together the individual skills we had gathered so far and looked at the overall purpose of having a site:

• To be a one stop shop for learning
• To have learning be able to be accessed from anywhere, anytime and at the pace the learner needs
• To allow rewindable learning
• To make our planning and teaching visible to everyone
• Weekly plans, timetables and overviews are available
• To allow personalised learning
• and most pertinent to the past couple of weeks, it is available for learning from home during lockdowns

We studied various existing sites from around the country and analysed them for their visual appeal (for the learners), their usability and functionality.  We looked at engagement, navigation, creativity, effective teacher practice and organising the sites.

I created my first website early in 2020 ready for what we knew was coming, a lockdown. I knew nothing about sites and it was a big learning curve. My site was basic but helped deliver learning over the few weeks my tamariki were working from home, but a lot did not have devices or internet to access it. When we came back, we had made the decision to deliver classroom work online also and we stepped up our efforts and our sites. But it wasn't until our school embraced Manaiakalani and started DFI professional learning that we realised what more we could achieve.

I have now created sites for my Guiding roles as well as my classroom. I feel a lot more confident after the past two sessions of learning to do more complex things and how to use the tools in the Google Suite.  I had a goal of achieving three things today on my site: add my weekly timetable to the home page (tick!), add a notices section (tick!) and to use some photos of my tamariki to create buttons. I was annoyed to find that although I had a lot of photos, none of them were suitable! That will have to be rectified when we get back. I can't wait!  I did manage to tweak some other things and get onto next week's learning too.  Have a look and click on the image below:

But the connectivity is more than just sites. It is about connecting with colleagues, not reinventing the wheel, sharing ideas and pedagogy, making connections with our whānau and our tamariki. I've only worked at one school; this is only my fourth year of teaching. I have kept in touch with most of my study cohort and they have all commented on the competitiveness and lack of sharing in the profession. We all studied as mature students and were all over 40 when we started. We had mostly worked in the corporate world (this shared history may be why we were drawn to each other) and had experienced people keeping things to themselves. For some reason we believed that teachers were more altruistic, and in some ways they are. However, the competitiveness is still rife with not many sharing their ideas or insights, their lesson plans that worked or their wonderful classrooms. Things are very much held close to their chests. With Manaiakalani it seems to be the absolute opposite of this situation and I welcome it.