Digital Fluency Intensive 2021 Day Six

 I have come away from Day 6 of the DFI feeling very accomplished after having a big chunk of the day making improvements to our Pūkeko class site. 

This stemmed from what we looked at this morning; the Manaiakalani kaupapa ‘connected’. We were provided with heaps of amazing examples of how Manaiakalani schools are connected in many different ways and it was so cool to see how far the reach was in terms of types of schools and geographic location. Maria spoke about how it is really cool that we all have shared language and are paddling in the same direction. There are so many opportunities for our learners and us as teachers to be connected, which is so powerful for learning. I really like what Maria said that put it so simply: “Connecting is how we learn off one another”. She also spoke about how both parties need to share in order for there to be a connection. An important understanding and I reflected that you can really see how all aspects of the Manaiakalani kaupapa tie into one another, e.g. visible, connected, learn, share etc. We ended with a whakataukī which I also found very powerful: 

Te mea nui rawa ia ko te noho tahi, ko te whakawhanaunga, ko te whakawhitiwhiti whakaaro 

...the important thing is living together, making friends and exchanging ideas

Another great reminder of why we put in the mahi with sites and blogs etc. It’s good to remember the bigger picture and that what we do very much serves a purpose for our tamariki.

Makaore took us through some things to think about when you are setting up or making changes to your site. The big two things were the visual appeal of your site and the usability. These brought forth questions such as:

• Are you engaging your audience?

• Are the learners visible? Are you as the teacher visible?

• Is your site easily navigated?

• Is there rewindable content that is easily accessible?

We then had some time to look at some examples of sites, ranging from junior primary right through to secondary, to see what was working well and what needed improving in terms of visual appeal and usability. It was a really useful exercise and gave me lots of good ideas for what I could tweak and add on my site. The feedback we then got from the other teachers in our bubbles in these areas was very helpful too. This feedback helped me to set my overall goal for my site: Make our site more engaging for our group of learners and add some more content.

I then split this into three smaller tasks for the day:

1) Improve visual appeal by adding colours and headings, and making fonts consistent

2) Add teachers to the home page

3) Add content to the inquiry page - hidden subpages containing our school values content

By the end of the day I accomplished all three tasks. I added some colours to make the pages look more interesting, and used the colour pick extension to make the theme of my site match the colour of the feathers of the Pūkeko. (Our learning space is called Pūkeko). I added a photo of the teachers and contact information to the home page which I think will be useful for parents especially. And I added all of the slides that we use when we teach our school values and social skills to our lovely new children to our Inquiry page. Now, instead of accessing them from the drive we can model to the children going on to the site to access the learning, and they will be able to go back and look at it with their parents if they want to. I also added some more content to the Maths page, to reflect what we are learning in the classroom. 

There is still a lot more I want to add and change on my site, but I feel happy that the site is already a lot more visually appealing and user friendly now. I think the improvements I made will help us to use it more in the classroom and will encourage whānau to access it more too. It’s a great feeling coming away from another day of DFI feeling more confident then when I started. Below are some screenshots of the before and after of my site so far!