DFI Thursday 3rd June: Collaboration

 Manaiakalani pedagogy: Visibility 

Visibility is one of the floor joists in the whare graphic. The floor joists are an essential component of the framework, they are not obvious until there’s one missing!

The who: Who should learning be visible to?

• Learners

• Whānau

• Colleagues

• The wider community

Visible to learners: unpacking the learning journey and making the process clearly visible to students. We need to give all learners an even playing field and make success possible for all learners, not just those who are able to successfully read the teacher’s mind and work out what answer the teacher is looking for. Learning available in advance, to avoid surprises and allowing students to be prepared.

John Hattie: what allows students to succeed in their learning? Feed forward and feedback in a timely manner. Hāpara, Google Sites and Blogger all help to achieve this.

Visible to colleagues and other educators: One example of this is the Manaiakalani class on air. These teachers have a webcam set up in their classroom, so they are able to share great practice online. Some teachers have chosen to make their inquiry visible by sharing it online. 

Designing a Multimodal Site

Engaging the hook: We want our site to be appealing to students. Sites need to have a pedagogical focus, and be multimodal.

Key Questions

• Multimodal: Different people prefer different modes of accessing learning and learn at different rates. How do we cater for this? 

• Engagement: the hook. How do we excite students about their learning? 

I really identified with the analogy of your class site being like your shop front window. You want to ‘sell’ the learning. It needs to look good and inspire learners to ‘come in and buy’. You want to show your site to reflect your class culture, and show the kind of learning that is happening in your class in a way that is visually appealing and easy to navigate. 

Multimodal design for behavioural engagement (Shop front window)

Multi-textural design (mix of different texts, videos, images etc) for cognitive engagement

Creating a Google Site

Having used a google site in my own classroom for quite some time, I knew the benefits of having a site where students could gain easy access to learning, whether they were at school or not, and their whānau could go to see what we were learning in class. But I hadn’t spent a lot of time designing the site myself. It was great to have a chance to explore this further, and to experiment with the layout and design of the site to make it more like a “shop front window”.