Teach Middle East Magazine Jan-Feb 2016 Issue 3 Volume 3 | Seite 22

Sharing Good Practice

The power of collaboration
in the ICT classroom
By Steve Bambury

WANTED: WEBSITE DESIGNER(Must work well as a part of a team)

A

website design project that
blends
real-life
learning,
entrepreneurship, competition
and collaboration.

WEBSITE DESIGN 1.0
Last year, I planned a project for the
students in Year 5 to design a class
website. The platform that they used
for this was Google Sites. Often
overlooked as it sits just outside of
the core Google Drive apps, Sites is
a relatively simplistic website design
tool but, much like the other Google
apps, provides the ability for groups
of students to collaborate in real time
on the same project. In 2014, the
project went well and each student
designed their own page before we
brainstormed ideas for sections on the
site and they began populating it with
content. I also peeled off the more
confident students and taught them
some of the more advanced controls,
such as customising the menus,
themes and layouts. After a couple of
sessions, I handed the reigns over to
their class teachers and they continued
to use the site as a platform to share
work and resources throughout the
year.
It went well but the idea could be
refined to push it to another level.
I wanted to incorporate better

20 | Jan - Feb 2016 |

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Assessment for Learning (AFL),
make it even more student-led
and contextualise the process of
web design. If you can provide real
world context for learning, then
the experience will always be more
meaningful for students. They will
identify the relevance of the content
and be more engaged in tasks that
they are set. By framing the project
with an entrepreneurial slant, students
could develop the feeling of working
as a part of an actual news website
or newspaper team. An element of
competition was then added, which
elevated things even further.

SESSION 1: Assessment for
learning
The first session worked much like the
previous incarnation of the project
except that the personal “About
Me” page that each student created
was used as AFL. This informed the
role that they would play throughout
the rest of the project. I provided
annotated diagrams of the interface to
reduce their need for assistance from
me. After a brief introduction to the
platform, they worked independently.
It helped that I had worked on a
Google Slides presentation with this

Marcos Marmarchi checks out one of the updates on the website.

Class Time