Day 6: Digital Fluency Intensive

Today Dorothy discussed the Connected aspect of Manaiakalani and showed us how it has grown to include eleven clusters.  She emphasised the fact that it is the Shared Language that all schools within these clusters connect together on:  learn, create, share, connected, ubiquitous, empowered and visible.  She explained that the last four are like puzzle pieces that need to fit together in order to have maximum effectiveness.

Clarelle also visited today to do the Deep Dive with us where we spent time looking at different sites and giving feedback on what works well with the site and what did not.  When creating our own class sites, she explained the importance of getting to where one needs to be in just 3 clicks.  She also asked us to think about these key things when designing our site:

• What is the purpose of your Google site?
• What is the theme that is going to pull it all together?
• How will your learners / users be accessing the site?

We were also able to get feedback on our existing class sites, as the whole class spent time together going from one site to the next.  We used Google forms to send feedback to each person in the DFI - which was super useful.  Then, we used Google sheets to compile all our individual feedback so we could improve our sites.  Thinking forward from the feedback I received, I will plan on creating a button to link our classroom blog to the site.  Also, I realised that some permissions were not enabled which I will get to fixing right away.

For the Create time today, we were able to fix our sites or create one.  Just having the time and space to work on this has been so beneficial and I feel more confident using Google sites from the extra practise.  I chose to revamp the Inquiry Site for my space for the Term 2 focus which is "How Can We Keep the Hive Alive?"  I was able to use the banner I created in Google Draw as the header which worked out amazingly!  The site still needs work, but as I go I am keeping in mind what feedback came out of looking at other classroom sites today and the importance of...

• Clean and crisp background colours
• Buttons that are easy to read
• Colour schemes in place and not too busy or overwhelming
• Buttons linking back to the homepage / classroom blog / school website
• Accessibility and easy to click through and navigate

I plan to upload all the images and videos here for my new entrant students to explore about the bees.  This will help them have a place where they can easily rewind the content we do in class and get excited about finding ways we can keep the bees safe and alive!