Digital Fluency Intensive #5

Enabling Access: Sites

This was our focus today for our first DFI back in Term 4. This was great timing as some of us are preparing already for 2020 and our new class/team sites.

In our Connecting with Manaiakalani session, Dorothy reiterated our Manaiakalani message that Connected Learners Share - Tohatoha. This is definitely true both online and in person. A great reminder to us as teacher to continue to keep this in mind as we start Term 4.

Our deep dive session dove into a heap of different sites and shared what we thought were visually appealing and if it was user friendly for learners. Following on from this each of us then presented our own class/team site and took the cohort on a tour of our site and where everything is. Our cohort were then given the opportunity to rate and give feedback about improvements we could make. This proved a very worthy activity as you become so used to your site because you use it daily, that if a third party comes along, are they able to find things so easily. Some key comments from peoples feedback were that some teachers hadn't shared access for everyone to view their students learning, and someone also made a comment about the class blog button not being easy to find which is true as this is not labelled but simply linked to each teachers name. I have already started working to make these improvements to our site.

Our last session was lead by Gerhard who took us through making buttons, and banners for our DFI sandpit site.

This was a great exercise and I can now confidently say that I know how to make buttons for my own inquiry sites in the future. During this time I also managed to have a go at the DFI google sites challenge. You had to complete the set of instructions in creating a site within 5 minutes. I took 8 minutes to complete mine so will definitely need to keep practising this at a later time.

Something I'd like to add to our current site is an image carousel as I know my learners would love seeing school wide events on display rather than hidden in a folder.
One cool tip I picked up today: Normally when taking photos of students learning or events, I take it on my phone, then upload 9 at a time to students blog photos folder which students have access to on our team 5 site. This takes a while and I normally get students to start writing their blog while I upload. Today, Shiralee and Rachelle shared that if we click into the folder first on our phones, press the plus button, click camera and WALLAH! You can take photos and this goes straight into the folder without adding to your gallery on your phone. I will definitely be using this tip from now on. Thank you ladies!