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Replied to Re: Meet The “Teacher Instagrammers” Who Moonlight As Influencers To Make Ends Meet by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (Read Write Collect)
Isn’t it sad when the only way for teachers to make a fair wage is by selling themselves and their work on Instagram.

The linked post: Teachers Are Moonlighting As Instagram Influencers To Make Ends Meet and the thread on @audreywatters’s tweet are fascinating.

 

I think of instagram as a nice silo for sharing and liking photos in a casual way (I like being liked too). It went bad when it removed the ‘time’ from the timeline. (I don’t like its lack of interoperability much either).

I don’t think I follow any influencers so this is a world outside my ken.

The idea of using instagram as a way of showing a shiny classroom has some of the same problems at tweeting to my mind. Not that my blogging is a great example of sharing classroom practise.

I am not sure about the Teachers Pay Teachers, concept. I feel a slight distaste, but am not sure why.

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Listened Tide Episode #107 from tidepodcast.org
This week, Doug and Dai discuss inter-railing, Android’s digital wellbeing controls, building ethical technology, how hacking works, taking time off chat apps, personality types, and more!

The first long podcast I’ve listend to in a while as I’ve mostly been listening to microcasts (some great ones listed on Microcast.club).

I’ve known Doug & Dai for a good few years, although I don’t think I’ve meet Dai in person, so it is nice to hear the informal chat going weaving round the edu (and not so edu) tech.

The most interesting link for me was PixelFed a federated image sharing platform, powered by the ActivityPub protocol. An instragam like service avoiding some of the drawbacks of instagram. I signed up, johnjohnston on PixelFed. It looks early days, but a not-yet working link to an API gives me hope of the possibilities of POSSE. I am still hoping that the new version of Sunlit will fill Instagram space for me, but I’ll try PixelFed for a while.

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It has taken me a while to get this one together. I am still experimenting with recording on the hoof. This time I decided to record a series of short clips in Voice Memos. the intention was to string them together quickly with Ferrite. I found that a bit footery on the phone and ran into the three track for free limit.

Returned to the problem on the iPad and Hokusai. Only took a few minutes. Both ferrite and Hokusai are made by the same developer! I think I might read Difference: Between Hokusai Audio Editor and Ferrite Recording Studio — Wooji Juice I need to get a bit more practice with these apps.

Also on:

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Here are some of the things I’ve tagged classroom over the summer holidays.

  • A garden alive with art: all-natural insect sculptures – in pictures I think my class might like this as it combines outdoors, insects and art. I suspect it is trickier than it looks to get these sorts of results.

    Inspired by the art of ikebana – a traditional style of Japanese flower arranging – Montreal-based artist Raku Inoue hand-crafts bugs using materials from his garden. He transforms his garden waste, including sticks, seeds and petals, to create his Natura Insects series. “I think about the main shape of the insect,” he says, “and try to find something to satisfy that. It’s very much like a puzzle.” As the year progresses, his creative options change. “I choose the materials according to what nature offers during that time. All four seasons offer many different materials to play with.” The series started as a morning routine over coffee to sharpen his thoughts for the day. “It was never meant to be a complex process, but rather an easygoing, morning mind-stretching exercise.”

  • Problem Solving: Grade 4 Mathematics There looks like there is a lot of resources on this site.
  • Control Alt Achieve: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

    To prove this I have used Google Sheets to create a “Random Writing Prompt Generator” that randomly pulls from a list of about 2,000 adjectives and 1,000 nouns to create over 2 million unique prompts. See below to get your own copy of the Sheet, learn how it works, and get more ideas on how to help your students write poems, stories, or other creations.

  • Create & Innovate with Keynote Pile of resources for keynote in classroom, links, embeded videos and some templates. (All About Me, Choose Your Own Adventure, Coding with Keynote, Eclipse Animations, Green Screen, Holograms, Illuminated Text (Poetry in Motion), Infographics, Invisible Buttons, Learning Journals, Prototype, Quiz Shows, Selfie Bingo & Shape Stories. )
  • The Literacy Calendar 2018-19 – Literacy with Miss P The following table provides a map of the academic year with a range of key calendar events. It includes national days or weeks and a whole host of school competitions and events. I’ve also added some key children’s literature award dates as it’s always good to keep an eye out for new and exciting quality texts.
  • ADE Worldwide Institute 2018: 5 Star Points From The Lone Star State. | Next Generation Learning; Today… As far as Pages is concerned, it too has brilliant functionality with the Apple Pencil, effectively becoming a powerful sketching tool as well. The workflow means you can easily create interactive EPUB books that can be viewed in iBooks. When starting a document, scroll down to find the Books template. Once selected, you can add text, photos, image galleries, videos, shapes, tables, charts and your own drawings to your document. On iOS you can also record audio directly to your document. This effectively means we will no longer need to spend £5 on purchasing the Book Creator App.
  • Lesson Plans – The Art of Ed
  • Bio Poem template PDF. I’ve used and amended this many times, unfortunately I’ll not be able to this year as for some of my pupils this is the third year in my class!

    A Bio Poem is all about you. It is a way for you to introduce yourself to others. Take some time to think about yourself – your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Then, use the template and example below to write your own Bio Poem.

  • Mr. Fahey’s Tech: UPDATED!!! 13 Ways to Enhance Math Lessons with Flipgrid

Featured image: my own, I spent a fair bit of the summer trying to get close to butterflies.

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Another experimental microcast. I recorded this on a walk last week using the iPhone audio memos app. Just kept a memo open and recorded fragments on the go. Unfortunately at some point I hit done and when I added more, without looking, I recorded over the start.

On editing in ferrite the app crashed everytime. So I switched to Hokusai 2 cut the start pasted it to the end and then levelled in Auphonic. Finally back in Ferrite I added the intro (recorded in Ferrite and run through Auphonic).

This if far too complicated. I also need a dead cat from the phone to cut down on wind noise.

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Liked The Game of Quotes by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (Read Write Collect)
Heather Marshall adapts the game Bring Your Own Book for the classroom. This involves a series of prompts to help think differently about what you are reading. Marshall also discusses creating your own prompts. This activity reminds me of the Hot Seat activity, where students are challenged to think...

The Game of Quotes: Getting once reluctant readers whispering “I want to read that!” – The Book Sommelier looks useful.

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As part of my summer holiday fun with WordPress I though I might create a ‘proper’ RSS feed for my microcast.

There are quite a few podcast plugins that would do the job but I though it might be interesting to try a bit of DIY.

Back when I started a class podcast at Radio Sandaig I used to create the RSS feed by hand with a text editor and a fair bit of copy and paste. Over at Edutalk we use feedburner to massage the feed for iTunes.

I used information from How to Roll Your Own Simple WordPress Podcast Plugin | CSS-Tricks to get me started with the template.

I copied the feed-rss2.php file from the wp-includes folder to my child theme folder renaming it feed-microcast.php

wp-content/themes/sempress-child/feed-microcast.php

I adjusted the query to get the posts from my microcast category. I also hard coded the title, link, image and a few other things to simplify the process a little.

I then used the template from CSS-Tricks as a guide to adding the various podcast tags to my template.

This ended up with a pretty broken feed, mostly due to my lack of care, but I fixed it up later I got it linked up.

I didn’t want to use the custom post type approach used in the article because that would involve editing all the old posts or converting them to the new type somehow.

My first idea was to create a feed template and switch to that when the RSS feed for my microcast category was called for.

After failing to get the template to switch for the standard category feed, /category/microcast/feed I ended up with a custom feed at /feed/microcast.

and I add

add_action('init', 'customRSS');
function customRSS(){
        add_feed('microcast', 'customRSSFunc');
}

function customRSSFunc(){
        get_template_part('feed', 'microcast');
}

to my functions.php file.

I then spent a bit of time using the W3C feed validation service until I fixed the feed up to valadate.

I’ve still got to get a link to the feed into the microcast category page head tag and I hope to do that as soon as I’ve gone a bit of research. For now I’ve a link in the sidebar.

Here is the template: WordPress RSS feed template for my microcast