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.

Three is a magic number for making sites about dung

Despite feeling a bit under the weather I was looking forward to another Tuesday of learning, and I haven't been let down.

We met Danni Stone, our Year 7/8 Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu partner from Point England. She was here to teach us all about Google Sites. It was lovely to meet her and to make the face to face connection. She is very knowledgable and helpful, also willing to share her journey of how things have evolved over the 5 plus years she has been on this Learn Create Share journey.

Dorothy introduced us to today's theme of create. Create is such a powerful tool to use. I took many notes as she spoke but here are a couple of standouts:

• Creativity is a doing word … the whole parts of our body, not just a screen.
• The digital world can give us a world that turbocharges our creativity … but it isn’t the be-all and end-all … it is one part of the wedge. (see graphic to see the different parts of the wedge)
• Digital can capture the creativity.
• We don’t want our learners to be consumers, we want them to be creators. 
• Students that take more responsibility for selecting topics to learn about and this lead to accelerated learning. 
• Create: empowering through choice, information/knowledge, developing skills, building capacity & scaffolding.

"Creativity focuses on the process of forming original ideas through exploration and discovery. In children, creativity develops from their experiences with the process, rather than concern for the finished product. Creativity is not to be confused with talent, skill, or intelligence. Creativity is not about doing something better than others, it is about thinking, exploring, discovering, and imagining" (Kohl, 2008).

All this information has made me ask the question: 

Does our YMS belief mean that we only think it is about the digital? Do we ignore the other wedges of creativity from the classes that are using digital devices more than the juniors?

Sadly, we don't get much time to verbally process this information. Sometimes I wonder if it would help me work through what we are already doing in our class/school before we move on. I know my brain can be like a sieve and things come and go as fast as Katy Perry changes her hairstyle.

(or Mel Raisin 😊😊)

The rest of the day was spent with Danni taking us through Google Sites. I have some experience using sites but it was great having some sandpit time. The tips on this slide are fantastic, especially the size for headers and buttons.

In anticipation of the opportunity to do some creating, I had brought along a new Sharp Reading resource on Insects. We have been able to create our own site which we will be able to use for half our class for reading next week. It was great to be working on it with my fab work wife. Angela hasn't had a lot of time on creating sites and I think she found it helpful.

It was also interesting learning about Dung Beetles. We aren't quite happy with it but the bones are there. A bit of tweaking and we will be away.

Our Site

What do you think about it? What would you suggest?