Weekly Reflections 6

 DFI Week 6

Reflection 6

This weeks learning centered around our class sites, picking up from last week about visible learning and talking about being connected.  This aligns with the Manaiakalani approach for effective teaching, accelerated learning.  The reminder that the Learn, Create, Share framework is an important part of our visible learning and teaching.  Scaffolding and rewindable learning are a big factor in the learning process for our tamariki and we can use our class sites to our learning and teaching advantage with a focus for our class sites to have functionality and access to our learning.

It was great to have the chance to look at some cool class sites in our session and see what kinds of things make a great class site, this in itself gave me inspiration for the future of my own class site down the track.  I know that my own class site is lacking in many areas, mostly because my class is only just learning about digital learning and our class sites were developed for the need of distance learning in these lockdowns due to covid19 and the rest is my lack of knowledge and confidence around this platform.  As I move further into the digital world of learning and teaching though I can see that these sessions have given me the advantage of learning some valuable tools and knowledge in this area to help me out.

I wasn't very comfortable critiquing others sites in my group as we all have different circumstances surrounding our knowledge of class sites and in no way am I qualified to pass judgment on someone else when my own site feels so inadequate. I don't have a problem with constructive criticism of myself and for the most part could feel the understanding of the circumstances surrounding our class sites from the others & welcomed their feedback.

I found this session great for giving us time to play around with our sites and add some different things from our learning such as buttons to link in our pages and as always our bubble leader Jacob is an awesome help.

I've spent some time this week reflecting back on our learning from Friday about class sites and the value of visible learning, as this is what my class site lacks at the moment.  It is purely at the moment a platform for whānau and tamariki to be able to access mahi in this lockdown.  I guess though, even if it does not state the actual learning and success criteria in words, whānau are able to see the type of learning their tamariki are doing.  To be fair though, I only put mahi up that we have already done in class and the tamariki are already very clear on WALTS and success criteria surrounding this mahi.

With that said, I am very keen to learn to display visible learning and teaching through my class site in the future. 

My goal on Friday was to set up 3 pages for curriculum areas, I have these but they are hidden as our Kura has instructed us to only have certain pages displayed at the moment for distance learning, intending to not overwhelm whānau.  My other personal goal was to have another go at creating buttons for my site this past week.  With some help from watching some video's ( that rewindable learning!) I managed to create some buttons which has already made access easier for my whānau, especially if they are using their phones to access the mahi (according to positive feedback). 
I'm really stoked about this and although the site is a work in progress, that was definitely a good start.