DFI Day 5: Collaborating and Creating with Google Sites

 Today's Manaiakalani Kaupapa 

Part I: Making the learning Visible - all aspects!

In earlier years, it has been well established that often student's way to success in school has been trying to figure out the GWITH of the lesson - "Guess What's In the Teacher's Head?" This is true from the planning, the lessons and learning, to the assessment. Often parts have been visible to different people at different times.  Eg.  Parents receive the end reports and sometimes the lesson activities when they help their children with the work, students work on the middle processes - the learning and assessing, and the teachers start from the beginning through to the end.  This also means that those who learned to "do school" could do well and those that could not or did not have support were left lost. 

At Ōtaki College, some of us use Hapara and some use Google Classroom as their main platforms for managing student work.  This is in addition to our class sites - which some teachers use as the learning platform for student or parent access, but others, like myself, have used my class site as a more static site for information with links to the actual work.  You can see this here on my varied class sites for 2022.  

VLS HMT 9A 2022        VLS English 10-O        VLS SOC 10T        VLS English L1

To be kind to myself - I had to learn very quickly how to make sites during lockdown.  I was able to do this with the generous assistance of my colleague tutoring me through a Google Meet session, and several Manaiakalani toolkit sessions that I used to "upskill" myself as last year was my first year at ŌC.   I decided to make things manageable - by having the only real "live" or changing parts of my class sites being my "Daily Planner" slide shows that detail our learning daily with links to guide students. This seemed satisfactory and working.

However, after today's session I am once again rethinking using Hapara as the main learning access site and instead switching to my Class site - considering the "store window analogy" in the video below. To attract engagement and make things simpler for students and their whanau - class sites may be the more user friendly option as they will be similar to other sites most are familiar with.  

However, I am also conscious that the layout of Hapara does lend itself to making things easier for those students who need a clear and repetitive structure so as not to get too distracted by the "bling" you can use in class sites.  Additionally, students are not the best at creating docs, naming them and filing them.  But... that is partly my fault for not establishing this at the beginning of the year in our routines.  

One negative aspect about class sites is that we need to recreate them each year for each class.  This is more work in some ways.  This is in addition to setting up Hapara workspaces, Google classroom (which I use as a backup- and to communicate quick reminders to students).  

 

So where to from here? 

My class sites are already mostly visible.  (So yay!)  

        Students can access their learning through my class sites and see the tasks and resources linked. 

             But I can make things even more clear.  

                    I am looking forward to next week when we will be "boosting" our class sites, 

                    or starting fresh.  

DFI Day 5 - Part II:  Collaborating and Creating Multi-Modal Sites

One part of the learning that has not always been visible or accessible to students, whanau and the wider world has been the teacher planning aspect.  Students are usually provided with content or skills to develop using content, and sometimes a learning goal or Big Question / Inquiry Question to Explore in a unit.  While most teachers I know are fully aware of the complexity of trying to meet the diverse needs of our learners, as well as find resources to attract student attention, today was review of T-shaped Literacy and planning with multi-modal texts.  In simplified teacher speak for students and parents, T-shaped literacy means providing access for students to broaden their understanding of a topic with a variety of types of texts and perspectives and deepen their understanding with varied complexity in the content.  You can read more about it here.  

Last year I attended a Toolkit session facilitated by Manaikalani and they, in collaboration with the  Woolf Fisher Research Centre, had some quick and clear resources to explain this concept with a slightly different slant on the types of texts we should try to aim for in our planning of content.  Take a look at their videos. 

T-shaped literacy marries well with using multi-modal texts to find as many ways as possible to allow students access to content.  T-shaped literacy and planning to include multi-modal texts are not so much new concepts in teaching and learning, but building upon or reframing from earlier educational practices.  My early teaching days used Bloom's Taxononomy and Gardener's Multiple Intelligences (now considered somewhat debunked) as ways to remind us to provide as many opportunities as we can for students to learn, develop and practice their skills.  Later, we were reminded again with language shifting to "differentiating" to meet the needs of all our learners.  How T-shaped literacy differs slightly  is in the description of the 4 types of texts.  Instead of multi-modal in terms of genre, text type and difficulty level, they use the types of texts described below, on the understanding that teachers will already be differentiating to meet the needs of their learners. 

Scaffolding Texts:  Introduce the Topic (content), "hook" student interest, 

set purpose or goal (best with a question) and introduce key new or topic specific vocabulary.

*Accessible (multi-modal), key concepts and vocabulary

Complimentary Texts: texts with similar perspectives or building upon the knowledge of the topic.  

 Challenge Texts - provide alternative points of view or questions to further student critical thinking on a topic.  Cause tension with students to push them to think beyond their own perspectives or the most common perspectives.

Student Choice Texts - allowing options for students to explore.  These will be texts students choose to fit their goal / purpose of their task or unit concepts. 

With this in mind, NZ Teacher, Dave Winter, along with many others, have put together this starting database to help teachers share resources and plan with this T-shaped multi-modality in mind.  

Today, a group of us collaborated and gathered resources that might be used for a "language feature focus through the use of stories with twisted endings.  You can see our collected resources here.  Keep in mind, our goal was to collaborate and gather resources quickly as a means to the introduction of creating a class site.  

From those resources, we spent the afternoon playing and setting up a new site - you can see mine linked to the screenshot below:

I chose to make this site as a single page site.  I can see that this one has a simpler, therefore more intuitively user-friendly layout, and has a bit more appeal in colours, images and selections.   This one includes all aspects of the planning and content.  The only thing missing is the actual tasks - and this is only because it is a demo practice site and not one I will have added the student learning tasks to... yet.  I think this shows some further interest and development using the T-shaped literacy multi-modal design.  I hope it shows further growth than my first sites linked above.   Suggestions are always welcome!

I am looking forward to learning more tips and tricks to continue my sites' development.