The impromptu and unofficial audit that I conducted of the visibility of Subject Google sites in November last year, also raised another interesting and peculiar issue. That being, the title that staff were giving to their sites. Interesting for a number of reasons, such as, the way in which staff were organising and using the learning content within their sites, and the way in which staff intended for students to access learning resources. This ranged across departments and also within departments, calling for the need for a certain level of consistency by which staff were to develop, or in many cases, redevelop the layout and name of their sites.
Some questions that evolved out of the issue of site names included …
- Who should the Subject site be targeted at?
- Who needs to know and understand the Subject sites?
- How will parents know how to access information about what their child is learning?
Further questions (and discussions) revolved around Sites as landing pads for Junior Subject Areas, whereby multiple teachers deliver the same subject to multiple classes …
- What do individual teachers need to include (as a baseline) in their Subject sites?
- How will landing pad sites be organised for core subject areas?
A discussion, and at times, interesting debate, took place between Russel (the DP in charge of Teaching and Learning), Dorie (fellow Middle Leader of Social Sciences and CoL Teacher for the Integrated Project) and myself (Middle Leader of Technology and CoL of Visible Teaching and Learning) over the appropriate name for Subject sites. Imagining that parents were trying to navigate to Subject sites based on information in their child’s timetable, we finally came to a consensus that all Subject sites be renamed to be the [Subject Name] with [Teacher Name]. We also discussed, and agreed, that Subject sites would have to be organised in tabs by year level for the junior school, and by NCEA level for the senior school. Each tab would have to include course outlines, calendars and units of work, as well as there being a tab for Careers. And so, Russel communicated these requirements to all staff during the Teacher Only Day at the start of the year. Staff are currently undertaking changes to sites to bring them up to spec. It will be interesting to see if this will make a significant improvement to the visibility of sites.
Here are a couple of examples ... +Karen Ferguson's DVC site and my DigiTech site!
Here are a couple of examples ... +Karen Ferguson's DVC site and my DigiTech site!
