DFI 2021 Week 6

Today has been so much less pressure! The pace has been much slower. It's been great! There has actually been time to breathe and consolidate what we have been learning. It's refreshing to finish the day with energy and not feel frazzled.

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

The default for being connected is visible - all want to share. To make a connection, both parties need to share.

I found out that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. I always wondered what it stood for, but not enough to find out. I think I thought it would be jargon I wouldn't understand, but there you go.

Tuhi mai, tuhi atu is a great programme. All our classes that have done it have really enjoyed it. I recommend it.

I really like how Manaiakalani makes everything so accessible, especially for whānau, wherever they might be in the world. 

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

I have so much appreciation for what goes into class sites. I can look at them now with more understanding. 

I took the opportunity we had to work on sites to look at our school website. It definitely needs updating. It was good to spend time looking at what content we had, how relevant it still was and what needs to change to make it more 'user friendly'. I've also updated some content on our existing site.

I've made a copy of our existing site and converted it to new Sites. As I suspected, much of it will need reformatting. This is a great opportunity for me to have a purposeful play in preparation for when we will have to change our website to the new Sites format. I've started a plan. 

It was great to look at the other two websites in our group that have used the new Sites. Thanks Jonathan and Perrie. It's made me conscious of how much scrolling is needed to access some of the information on our site, especially on our front page!! I love that we have easy buttons now! I need to think about the purpose and suitability of dropdown menus and buttons.

The blogger tips were really good. Knowing how to control spam comments is very useful. I didn't even know 'spam blog comments' were a thing.

Questions I have:

How can we make our school website multi-modal? Instead of a home page blurb could I do a voiceover with images of our school and our students?

What can we do if we can't get an image of our artists' art from creative commons or other similar places? Would it be ethical to take a screenshot? Would it be a nice way to make contact with the artist (if they are still alive) to ask them if we could put a particular image of their art on our site this year as they have been chosen to be a class artist?

What did I learn that could be used with my staff?

I really liked the sites feedback form and I think it would be a good exercise for our teachers to do, especially after the learning we did with Phil on class sites earlier this term. They could fill in the form to analyse their own site and people could choose a partner to do reciprocal feedback on as part of their professional growth cycle.

I'm going to talk to everyone about us putting our pepeha as a link from our names on our school site.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?

I look forward to integrating what I've learned on a multimodal site for my maths class. For example having questions in a form, YouTube video and/or song, ARBs. I still have my partially constructed site.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

I'll keep the three click rule in mind for any sites I go to now.

I spoke to a couple of friends who couldn't understand, with all our 'busyness' why I was doing this. Sometimes, when I have meeting after meeting after meeting I also wonder, but it is opening my mind up to new understanding and helping me think of new possibilities about how my teachers teach and how my learners learn. Now. Not in the future, now. I felt it was time I tried to catch up.

Thanks everyone for this great opportunity 😀