DFI Day 6 - Sites (Enabling Access)

 This week for DFI we learnt how to enable access on our class sites.

It was such an interesting day as we explored other class sites of all different year levels and evaluated them with our group. It was a good opportunity to reflect on the class site that my hub uses as we spoke about what makes a great site and what is not useful to students. We learnt about the two main criteria that makes a site successful - visual appeal and functionality. In terms of visual appeal, I learnt how important it is that the site connects to the learner with relatable and fun images, that it is simple (not overcrowded with information) and that it is bright and bold. In terms of functionality, the key points that I learnt were that learning should be easy to access within just a few clicks and that the site should be easy to navigate for anyone. That is, a parent should be able to find their child's learning, timetable, teacher information etc without someone needing to guide them through it. These are criteria that I feel really proud about when it comes to our year 3 and 4 class site which my colleague Clarelle Carruthers created this year. There are 3 teachers in our hub and we all contribute individually on our levelled learning pages. Next year, I would love to contribute more to the creation of our class site to put what I have been learning into action!

Upon reflection of our site, I didn't want to change anything on the home page or main skeleton of the site as that is not a decision that I can make on my own and I am happy with how it looks. Instead I found something to change on my own learning pages. Each week, I put all of my planning on slides for maths, reading and writing. Usually, it is one slide per week. Dorothy reminded us that the learning on the site should be rewindable and it should be easy for anyone to understand (eg parents). I realised that my maths slides were not rewindable and need an explanation from a teacher as to what each activity is for and what order to do them in. When I say rewindable, I mean that it is not easy to flick back to a specific maths slide several weeks, months or years later and understand what to do with it. Today, I clicked on one maths slide and couldn't even remember what each activity link was for and what the main learning intention was behind those! So I changed the way I do my maths slides so that there are titles, images, videos and explanations (if needed) so that anyone can look at the slide and find it not only more visually appealing but easier to understand. I plan to also make my reading slides more multimodal by adding more videos and images to them as this is something that I haven't done in a while.

Below are screenshots of what my maths slides looked like before and after.

Below are screenshots of our class site for our year 3/4 hub which is called The Block.  These screenshots are of 2 things that I like about our site. The first screenshot shows the home page where the main learning buttons are bold and easy to find at the top of the page. The second screenshot is the page that you land on after clicking the writing button. What I like about this is that the children's names are under each button so they know which group to click on. This makes is really easy at the beginning of the year when children are learning how to navigate the site or later in the year when their levelled learning groups are changed. Learning from previous terms are also linked at the bottom of the page.