Is it a bird, is it a plane ... no, it's a site!

Sup ... yo ... hey ... opps ... I mean Kia ora, hello, welcome to this week's blog. We have the privilege to have Clarelle, from Point England with us. Clarelle has been teaching at Point England for four years. She also had an awesome TIGER top!

Dorothy took us through visible learning. This is such an important part of the vision of Manaiakalani. The power of learning being visible and available to everyone; students, whanau, community and the world means that the students are provided with an authentic audience for their work. It also means whanau can be connected to the classroom which goes beyond simply walking into the classroom and finding a book. 

Visible Teaching removes the surprise element, time upfront and the learning rewindable for afterwards but also in advance. - Accessible - online, shared visibly to anyone with the link, removing password barriers. Available - everything the learner needs is present - no scrambling to share material, activities etc at the last minute. Advance - BEFORE it is needed, before the deadlines.

We know how excited students get when they find comments on their blogs from a parent or another family member or even a random person. This also counts for what they are working on. Knowing that Mum, Dad, Whanau care enough to look and talk or comment means that their work is valued. And that is what children want ... to be valued and for their work to be valued.

Also ... sharing online and with the world is powerful and leads to all sorts of wonderful things happening. Check out this video to see how being online found a special audience.

The rest of the session was spent exploring sites. We spent some time analysing sites; what was great about the way they look and about the way they function. Then we had a turn sharing our own sites for analysis.

It is amazing how quickly you realise that it isn't the way you thought it was and all the things you need to do to make it more user-friendly and visible. I know I thought I had made sure all the things were available for others but it turns out they weren't. Sad face!

Thankfully, the timetable allowed us time to have a good tidy up and a cleanup. I spent far to much time sorting the header for the home page. Note to self: simple is best! and if it starts to take longer than 20 minutes its time to do something else.

The finished product isn't terrible, it looks better than it did. (Should have taken a photo of the original but I didn't).

Angela did a lot of sorting the folders out so that they were available online. This means all the work for this year is now freely available. I did a lot of 'zhuzhing' of buttons and things, working on the flow of pages and making media available from the site too. The biggest changes were to the blogger page. I wonder if any of the students will notice?

It has felt really good to be able to get things sorted. Often I notice that things need fixing but I run out of time or forget about them. What a gift this course is for the teachers who are attending.