Session Six: Enabling Access - Sites

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Today we covered "Connected" - one of the original Manaiakalani goals from the beginning when they wanted students to connect with an authentic audience.

We have all lived and breathed the Manaiakalani kaupapa during our online teaching and learning in the Covid-19 lockdown. One of the biggest learnings from this was to "limit the links" - the less clicks the better for students to navigate their way around our learning sites to get to their learning. We were in a fortunate position where we had time to update our school website to have the up-to-date links for each learning hub learning site and blog.

Connect also refers to the support we receive from our fantastic Manaikalani facilitators. We have been very lucky at South Hornby to have Mark Maddren as our first facilitator, and now have Kelsey Morgan. Schools and teachers are supported to connect with students and each other. We enjoy our support from our facilitator - staff meetings, in class support, leaders of learning professional learning group meetings, our cluster Uru Manuka site, etc. One of the best things recently has been the cluster session for all new staff to the cluster prior to the school year beginning to immerse them in the Learn Create Share philosophy and introduce them to what Maniakalani is all about. It is great to target the whole group of teachers from various schools in both clusters in Christchurch.

The four elements work together to make the kaupapa work and function in our community.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

The Deep Dive session with VIcki (Evaluating Class Sites) was beneficial in that it really focused on the visual appeal and user experience of learning sites (what works well and what doesn't work well). It was good to have time to look at other people's sites and look at those two areas.

This led on nicely to Gerhard's Chalk & Talk session on Leading Learning using a Google Site.

Woolf Fisher's 5 Affordances should be reflected in our learning sites as well -

• engagement
• teaching conversations
• cognitive challenge
• visibility
• scaffolding

Venessa's session about Blog List - Sidebar Gadgets was good (although it now adds to my "to do" list). I will add this to my home class student's blogs, and then show my Y4-6 teachers how they can then do it to their students as they all have admin rights to their blogs - I am not going to volunteer to do it for them.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  

One of the most useful things we learnt today was "limit the clicks" - make sure your learning site is easy for students to navigate with 3 clicks maximum.

It was fantastic to have the huge session in our Bubble groups to explore each other's sites and provide feedback to each of them. Having the time to then set goals on our action plan and tick them off was great. My goal was to check the visibility of content on our hub learning site - using an incognito window to check hub site to make a list of what was not visible; change sharing settings on documents so they are now visible; do any updating to the learning site that needed attention. This was all achieved - it was great to have the time to do this. As teachers we are "time poor" and I appreciate having the time today to get this done.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

Anything that is going to save me time in my professional life has to be beneficial in my personal life.