Session Five - Digital Fluency Intensive "Collaborate - Sites"

Today was a day of new learning for me.  Up until now, I have been somewhat familiar with what we have been learning about as I have been using them professionally to some extent.  I have not made a Google site before today as I do not have a class that needs to access their learning through one and anything that I have wanted to share with children has been uploaded to other class sites which have been done for me.  I do feel quite overwhelmed today and will need to spend time this week revisiting Sites and having another go.

Listening to Dorothy talking about making learning visible I found the concept of "Cultural Capital" interesting.  Now that we can share learning with our children and their whanau through the use of the Internet so many more children will be given the chance to succeed.  Also making what the teacher expects visible made me think back to when I was a student particularly at high school.  I can remember finding it difficult to know what the teacher wanted us to do unless it was clearly spelled out.  In fact, when I was at Teacher's College I can remember that we were given rubrics that told you what you needed to do to get a 'b grade', 'a grade' etc.  This took all of the guesswork out of completing assignments and made getting acceptable grades much easier for me.

I will need to have a think about how best to build a special needs website and what the purpose of it will be.  Our school website has a lot of information on it around the systems we use for special needs and information for our parent community.  I would prefer to make a site that the children could use and am thinking that I may make a site around reading using decodable texts and phonological awareness for some of the children who struggle with literacy.  This site could be available to the children who are in the reading groups that I take but also made available for other learners within the school that may need further practice and resources.

The learning celebration in term 4 is going to involve the whole school and their whanau and needs a site so may work on this.  As the annual Canterbury A & P show is canceled for this year we are going to hold our own version of this (name to be decided!).  This links really well into our overall theme of growing that the children have been learning about this year.  There will be opportunities for families to create, grow, bake, make, and enter their hard work into a variety of categories for judging.  Having a site that will have the enrolment forms, guidelines, and information about the day itself would be a useful tool as families will be able to find out all that they need in one space.  As this is the whole school I won't need to be creating the website on my own I can enlist the help of more experienced users to work with me and learn further from their knowledge.

Last Tuesday our staff met with Mark and Sharon from Manaiakalani and spent time looking through some of the learning sites that some of our staff have created.  I was blown away by all of the amazing stuff that was on many of them.  The fact that the children can interact with the site and the opportunities for rewindable learning I found very valuable.  I know that if I get stuck creating a site that many experienced colleagues can give me a hand.