How sites make learning better
If we are looking at great pedagogy, we're thinking about engagement, teaching conversations, cognitive challenge, visibility, and scaffolding (rewindable learning is the key here). Google Sites is one way to support enabling this.
Sites allow a one stop shop with accessible learning at any time, at any pace and anywhere, rewindable learning, personalised and multiple opportunities for learning, visible teaching (the planning and the learning), allows easier access to authentic texts. Sites are a great place to collect and curate resources as they pop up; I often email myself links that I come across in my everyday life that will also work in the classroom; I also, though, need to go through and weed out stuff that isn't useful and try to avoid overload as it's very tempting to horde.
Sites allow a one stop shop with accessible learning at any time, at any pace and anywhere, rewindable learning, personalised and multiple opportunities for learning, visible teaching (the planning and the learning), allows easier access to authentic texts. Sites are a great place to collect and curate resources as they pop up; I often email myself links that I come across in my everyday life that will also work in the classroom; I also, though, need to go through and weed out stuff that isn't useful and try to avoid overload as it's very tempting to horde.
Navigation is an issue that I have at the moment: it's obvious to me, but the site is now huge and kids get lost. So, we have class Google Sheets that makes visible the plan for each kid and tracks their next steps. Putting the direct links into this Sheet as a shortcut for the kids definitely helps. But the site needs simplifying ahead of 2022 - something to work on over the Christmas holidays.
But it is also important to remember to make navigation a deliberate teaching act; just like we would do with a textbook - it's not always obvious that the grey text box in that Math text book is the instructions of how to do it so you better read it. Kids need this pointing out to them and this doesn't change simply because we're now on a web site. This is another example of the ongoing and explicit teaching of higher level reading skills that we all need to do.
My main learnings today were around creating custom buttons to make the visual aspect of my site much more appealing. Nice and easy to do, especially once you have a good template set up in Google Slides that you can just duplicate and titivate. It was also good learning to have hidden pages on my site for parts that are 'under construction' or not needed at this point in time to make navigation easier for my students.
Kia ora Hillary,
ReplyDeleteGreat point about the site navigation and deliberately teaching this to learners. Do you archive your site and start afresh or make a copy and begin with that for the next year?
Ngā mihi,
Maria