DFI Day 5 - Collaborative Teaching and Learning

 

Click here to see the Google Site that I created today.

Today we learnt about collaborative teaching and learning through the use of multi-modal texts on Google Sites. Dorothy reminded us of how important it is to keep learning visible - and a great way to do this is by moving teaching online. Digital learning gives students more choice, engages them and opens up new ways for students to collaborate. One way that we can make great use of digital learning is by creating multimodal Google Sites. Dorothy explained that multimodal learning is when teachers provide several different types of resources to enhance a lesson. For example, instead of just providing one book about a topic, we can provide videos, images and supporting texts from a variety of books and websites to support the main text.

The above image is a screenshot taken from the Google Site that I created today. We were given a topic in small groups and shared resources with each other online through a Jamboard. Jamboard reminded me of Padlet. As I have had experience creating Google Sites before, I felt pretty familiar with the basic set up of the site. However, my main take away from today was how to create a site button through Google Drawings. I haven't made buttons before as I wasn't completely confident in making them, so today was really useful to have a good amount of time to practice creating them. I found it a bit tricky at first so I was glad I had the time to play around and work it out. On the 'read' page, I shared several reading resources which are both online and offline. I used the 'watch' page for Youtube videos to support the main texts (Katie's Butterfly and The Classroom Caterpillars). I also created a 'create' page where I could add several activities to the Google Slides deck on that page.

Overall, today was a good reminder for me to make learning multimodal so students have wider and deeper learning opportunities.