DFI Day 6 - Enabling Access Sites

 This week we were back at the lovely Paparore School with our DFI cohort.

First up we had Dorothy joining us online from Tamaki. The pedagogy and kaupapa this week was about how the word "Connected" fits. The importance of how being connected is so very important. Making connections for the Manaiakalani schools in that they are so geographically close, prior to this they did not connect that often, just like any other schools in New Zealand. Being digitally connected though has been an awesome move, forming great relationships. She talked of a shared language that we have that is unique to our own kura, comparing this to others where things could look totally different in other schools, but we have the one common goal of Learn, Create, Share. We need to all just focus on the same goals and paddle our waka in the same direction. Manaiakalani has a different learning focus for each term. There are multiple opportunites to be able to connect for us and our tumuaki. We are lucky enough to be able to partiipate in this DFI course. They have taken the tech power behind Twitter and have adapted it to be able to see data and statistics. To make a connection, both parties need to SHARE. I like this saying.........The important thing is living together, making friends and exchanging ideas - Te mea nui rawa ia ko te noho tahi, ko te whakawhanaunga, ko te whakawhitiwhiti whakaaro. 

Kerry and Kariene chalk and talked about using google sites. Creating change and creating more learning with your site. The causing of accelerated Shift was engagement, teaching conversations, cognitive challenge, visibility and scaffolding. Make sure that our site is like a one stop shop for our learning so we can enter whenever we need to plan for the week ahead and that our students know that, thats where they go to access their learning. Make sure it has visual appeal, the theme, good layout and keeping your fonts similar so it doesn't start to look too busy. 

Following on from this we spent some time looking over a selection of class sites. Checking them for visual appeal and site functionality. We had to record our findings, what works well and what doesn't work well. This was good to see how other schools use their sites. Next up we had the opportunity to present the site that we had created and get feedback from our peers.

Next Vicki joined us online, she went over how to personalise your learning site. She did a google drawing and used pixabay to get some cool pics to create a button. Following on from that we had the opportunity to update and work on our site again. I definitely needed this time because I hadn't been able to work on my site since creating it so am pretty pleased I now have something that the children can actually use now.

Last up we joined Vicki online again to go over Hapara Hot Tips, student dashboard. She also showed us how to deal with spam on blogs. 

Today was another awesome day spent with our amazing cohort!