The following is a description of the adaptations that I made to the current project for the NCEA Level 1 students to undertake during Lockdown Level 3 in August 2020. 

This group of learners are my Target Learners for my Inquiry 2020, so I was particularly keen, to come up with strategies that will enable the students to continue with their program of learning.  Having undertaken a similar process for my other senior students, I was fortunate in this instance, that I was able to return the same project and the same standard, but adapt the resources that the students would access, in order to continue with their work in a remote learning environment.

The project is to Develop a Website and includes the following standard:

AS91880 Develop a digital media outcome

This achievement standard involves developing a digital media outcome, in this particular instance, a Website.

Prior to Level 3 Lockdown, students were undertaking tasks in class to work towards completing the project.  This involved the use of Visual Studio Code; a free software download that is used for code editing.  Unfortunately, the application cannot be downloaded to and used on Netbooks or Chrome books, which are the common devices that students would use to learn from home, including during the lockdown period.

Fortunately, I was able to adapt the course materials to use a different application for Remote Learning during lockdown.  This is the Codepen Online Code Editor which I dropped a link to, into the Project Workspace as shown below.

I explained to the learners what they would have to do with their existing work, in order to use the Codepen Online Code Editor, to see what their feedback was.  It would essentially mean that the students would have to re-do some of their existing tasks, to ensure that the Codepen application included all of the work that they had completed up until lockdown, in order for the learners to progress forward with their tasks.  As much as this meant that time would be consumed doing so, the learners seemed to be happy and grateful about a way of them progressing forward with their work.

Signing up to Codepen - Alternative to Visual Studio Code for Remote Learning

Click on the image below to view a short clip of me demonstrating to learners the signup process for Codepen.

Setup of HTML pages in Codepen

The following screenshot is me demonstrating to students how to setup their HTML pages eg. Pens, in Codepen.

Saving Codes to Google Docs

Working in Codepen is just a temporary measure for during Level 3 Lockdown.  When we return onsite and back to the classroom, we will also return to using the original software, Visual Studio Code, that is accessible on the desktop Mac computers.

In order to have a backup of the work that students are completing every lesson online using Codepen, I had the students set up folders and documents into their Google Drive, as shown in the screenshots below.