DFI- Week 6

How empowering is it to be connected? Technology allows us to make real connections with people. The ability to connect beyond the people we know is essential.

Today we talked about visibility and the importance of everything we do being visible. I understand this but at the same time disagree with this to a point. There are some things that don't need to be visible to everyone e.g. resources we've paid for and don't have the rights to share OR reflections and observations. In saying this however, over the last year my opinion has been changed about ensuring the learning is open to any teacher or learner who may want to access the learning. We are professionals who like to share, share, share.

Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu- Quad blogging. Many schools have used this to connect across the country. Valuable connections for students. Allows other kids in NZ to see that CHCH kids are just like them. We used to have cluster blogging buddies, I wonder why the children don't have these anymore?

We also spent time looking through different Google Sites today and had the chance to talk to others in the DFI group and receive feedback about our site. We used this feedback to then moderate our own sites, making changes and adding new functions to make it more user friendly. I did the following: - hid some pages which aren't currently being used - add where we are in NZ - add more columns so that don't need to scroll so far to find kids blogs - fixed some buttons that didn't seem to be working

Next steps (for next year) - Bilingual buttons - Use audio - Use photos of the kids?? I saw a really cool example on a Point England site. (see image below)