Digital Fluency Intensive 6: Being VISIBLE, GOOGLE Sites, New Teaching Code

In today's session, we got to grips with the VISIBLE aspect of the Manaiakalani kaupapa - the need to make our teaching and learning open and available for students, whanau and other educators.  Online platforms like BLOGGER and GOOGLE SITES are powerful tools to increase the reach and profile of learning beyond the classroom.

Dorothy's presentation raised some challenging points. With the switch from pencil and paper to using devices, do parents have the same visibility - are they able to check their child's learning via blog posts as easily as they could flicking through an exercise book? What is an appropriate level of visibility? How do we balance the desire to showcase aspects of students learning journeys (e.g. test results) versus the need to maintain student confidentiality?

Putting theory into practice, we had a session on GOOGLE SITES. The aim was to create a Professional Learning site using the newly released  'Standards'  from the Education Council to capture evidence for six new standards: Te Tiriti o Waitangi partnership, Professional Learning, Professional Relationships, Learning-focused Culture, Design for Learning, and Teaching.

We each started with a sandpit site - a safe space in which to 'play' with HTML coding and figure out how to change up the layout of site pages using different table formats to merge columns or rows. We then split into three groups to create our own sites. I joined Matt's group to try out Image mapping.

We used pixlr to help define co-ordinates within sections of our chosen image. We added these sets of numbers into the HTML coding - this mapped specific sections of the image to another site page. It took a while to sort out the various co-ordinates and if one set of numbers was not quite right, it created a weird zig-zag shape!

I am happy with the end result. My new site looks professional - the landing page is simple and uncluttered, AND even better it works (!) - a single click on each heading, leads to a different teaching standard. The hard part will be keeping the pages up to date.

Image Mapping is time consuming but well worth it to achieve a site page that is clean, slick and functional.  Feel free to test out my new standards site for yourself by clicking here or on the circle image above.