ETL523 – Assignment 2: Part C – Reflective Blog Post

Creating this Digital Learning Environment was a good challenge. Working with Weebly wasn’t new to me having created an e-portfolio before, however, having to create a website that suits the tastes of everyone in the group was an interesting discussion.

Communication was completed via Facebook Messenger with video calls when needed. Our collaboration was great as we gave each other feedback that was honest but not worded to offend. The extension offered us a chance to create a solid website that outlined everything we wanted to and to what we considered to be a high standard.

With my prior experience with Weebly, I offered to create the basis of the website and to do the ‘background’ work of setting everything up. With quite a bit of the textual aspects, we wanted it to read as if we were having a conversation in the office or staffroom. We wanted it to be approachable to educators (as it is designed to be a Professional Development style website) and having a slightly more informal tone. Educational modules need to be informative and user friendly, hence, our use of links in pages as well as drop down menus. We ensured that these were some of the main features of the module.

Ensuring that the individual aspects of the module flowed was key. I have prior knowledge of Google Classroom as I use it on a day to day basis which made it great to be able to share the knowledge that I have. A challenge of mine was showing how to use Google Classroom but ensure staff and student privacy. This was alleviated when talking to a colleague about it and she suggested creating a new Classroom and record that instead. This meant re-recording what I had done but it was worth it to ensure staff and student privacy. From here, it is logical to move onto the actual content to populate the Classroom with, hence the audio and video mastery sections.

Translating this back into my own situation, I hope to share this with staff at my site and this can help them create their own easy-flowing Classroom and when they feel ready to do so, move onto audio and video recordings. I hope in the future to be able to use different platforms (such as Microsoft Teams) and create tutorials similar to the one that I did for Google Classroom.

Collaboration within an online learning environment is fraught with danger, but I believe that we have been able to pull together and create a module that works well and shows what we have been able to bring to the table as well as learn during this task.

For full details of the module created; please see here: https://etl523-digital-citizenship.weebly.com/