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Reflections from DFI course - Day 5

 Today we focused on Google Site, and our focus was solely on Multi-Modal site. There was the main text we focus on, and around it, there were different forms of texts that helped understand the topic.

The topic I focused was Super Heroes. To learn about super heroes, we came up with activity ideas first using Google Jamboard. This was another app I haven't used before. It was a whiteboard app where you can collaborate with people and there were some useful tools like lazers that you can used to present. 

After that, using those ideas, we built our new DIY site seperate to our already-made class site. Because I have made class site before, it was fairly easy to do. 

Only thing I had a hard time with was making the buttons from scratch. Getting the pictures for the buttons and making it circular was easy enough, but when I saved the file onto my computer and uploaded it as a photo, the icon looked quite tiny and it had a lot of unnecessary space. I fiddled with this for a long time, trying to upload it using picture upload or google drive upload. Neither of them fixed this problem, but I remembered there was a template we were given for the 1st term when we first started making our class sites. I went onto the file and realised I had to make the page really small so the icon can fit right into the page without any space on it. I realised that I had to go to page set up and fit it into the size of the icon itself instead of trying to fit the icon onto the page. 

Another thing that was taking long time was finding resources. I found some useful Youtube videos for some of the learning activities and embedded them. 

I think the part I'm most happy about this site is that children get to choose an activity for each curriculum instead of having to do everything. That way they could be more engaged into the activities because they have chosen them themselves, rather than being teacher-driven choices. 

Also, I think maybe I could have made the texts on there less long and wordy maybe...since it is for Juniors. More pictures too. However, my brain was screaming for rest instead of adding anything else to the site to make it look colourful and cool. 

Overall, I thought this was a cool way to encorporate different subjects into one topic, just like how we do a language experience or inquiry topic at school, even though this is probably more effective online then in class. 

So here it is. This is my new DIY site.

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