Session 5 - Leading learning - Enabling Class Sites

Connecting with Manaiakalani - Connected

Schools in Manaiakalani met for competition - sports days, speech competitions etc but they did not 'Connect' about learning.

Tuhi mai Tuhi Atu

A systematic organised way of making connections through blogging across the clusters. Groups are organised so class blogs are visited and commented on, can be done during Literacy sessions. It could be something we could look at being a part of again. Give the children more purpose behind blogging and commenting, be good for them to have people visiting and commenting at their work as we are still having problems with connecting parents and families onto blogs.

Exploring sites - link to slides

It was valuable having the opportunity to explore other class sites. 

Our own syndicate site - no dropdown of reading groups / Writing drop down is not across the top.

* Beginning of the year activity - children to create a tour video of the class site. A good resource for parents and family but will also show their understanding of the class site.

Stepping outside our own likes and preferences and thinking about what will be best for our learners.

Important to plan your page out first and everyone gets to share their ideas and collaborate. Use post-it notes, whiteboards, big sheets of paper etc.

Think about colour sets - can google colour palettes - blue and green colour palettes.

Creating timetables - rewindable video of the steps on the slides.

Explore

This was a time for us to share our own class sites with everyone and for other group members to give us feedback and tips. This was a very useful thing to do and Shiralee and I were able to set some goals of things we would like to work on and change on our Te Waka Ako site. 

Some useful tips we received were around issues such as the layout of our work in the different pages, having a differentiation between the different week's work. This was easily rectified by changing the background colour for the different weeks and adding a simple title such as "Term 4 Week 1" at the top of each section. We went through each subject page and did this. 

We decided that we would like to have a copy of our weekly timetable visible on our homepage. This will be great for the children to check in what they have on for the week. We can also add if any staff are out for things and little reminders for them. This will be a great tool for parents and families to access also.

Shiralee and I added a photo of the three of us to the homepage - we didn't want to have a blurb about each other, we wanted to keep it mainly about the children. We will also add a photo of Shamim and Bjorn, our teacher aides.

Working and exploring through other sites helped to identify a few things we need to put some thought into and work on later...

Children navigating their way through our site - how many times are they having to click to get to their work? Remember the 3 click rule!

We also noticed that some pages didn't have much loaded onto them, eg. Writing. So we need to cater for more opportunities for rewindable learning in this area. Maybe create slideshows around the genre we are working on at the moment for the children to refer back to. We seem to have provided for these opportunities in other areas but not Writing.

Quick Workshops

Image Carousel - on google sites. How to load up images using this. Shiralee and I thought we could use this on our homepage and add a carousel of images of the children from their different activities for that term.

Making site Buttons and Banners- when making them within google sites - one generic button type and you have to use the theme colours and all buttons will have the same colour.

Making buttons and banners using google drawings allows you to be more creative. 

This link Creating Site Buttons will take you to a google drawing with the steps.

Making Banners a useful tip I learned when making banners was resizing the canvas so that it will make it smaller or bigger when you add it to your site.

Don't forget to download as a PNG image!

Overall a really useful session and I feel like we made some practical modifications to our syndicate site.