DFI 24 April 2020. Enabling Access - Sites

We started today talking about being connected with our learners and with each other, which is particularly important and in many ways more difficult during these Level 4 Covid 19 times.

An interesting activity that was suggested (and I plan to do) is to look get the students to look at the Manaiakalani Twitter feed and chose 2 or three interesting blog posts to comment on.  Then to reflect on why they chose those posts and post that reflection on their blog.

The Toki Pounamu and full Manaikalani twitter feeds can be found by clicking here and here
            

We spend some of the day evaluating other classes sites.  We considered the visual appeal and the user experience for each site.

Gerard gave us lots of ideas to make our sites appealing and easy for our users.  The site is for our learners and we should ask for their input into how they find it easier to navigate.  He suggested we set a task for our students to explain how to navigate the site.  There is an example of this here

The rest of the day we spend in our small group exploring each others class sites, giving feedback and improving them.  I created new literacy and maths pages, at this stage I have hidden them from navigation, but when the students click on the weekly plan, it will take them to the new page.  I am happier with this navigation.  Here is the link to my site.  It is evolving.  At some point I would like to have separate pages for each literacy and maths group, however the students are not used to navigating this way and I would prefer to introduce these changes face-to-face when they are back at school.

The final tip for the day was around adding a gadget to the class blog to show all the students blogs and the activity on them.   My class blog already had these on it, however the gadget was too far down the page so I moved it up.  It looks much better now.