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Photos on the map:

walkmap

and on Flickr

Yesterday I went on this familiar walk.

Bright day with clear skies and a lot of haze. Little or no breeze. Waerm, t-shit all the way.

The grass and heather on the hills has not started growing, very dry too, which make for easier walking.

Lots of wee birds singing in the woods at the start.

Stonechat and wheatear further up the path.

A common lizard on the way up Troisgeach.

Quite a few white feathers then a few ptarmigan neat the top of Troisgeach.

Pools were filled with frogs, croaking loudly and mating all over the moor .

Plenty of deer sign but no deer.

As I came off Meall an Fhudair what looked like a peregrine flew by.

As I got back to Troisgeach a couple of eagles circling and drifted off south.

Met the ptarmigan again.

Half way down Troisgeach I sat down an the two eagles appeared briefly over the ridge to my side. By the time I got over only one was in sight, being mobbed by a raven or crow. The size of the eagle compared to the mobber made me sure it was an eagle.

Interesting Ground Beetle. Carabus nitens perhaps on the track.

A few butterflies, peacocks and one orange tip near the bottom.

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Watched Jolly Brancher Demo from youtube.com

Following from this conversation
Tom Woodward whipped up a plugin to clone posts on a WordPress Multi-site blog to one of your own.

I think this could be a really useful way of giving pupils a template for e-Portfolio post. I’d be very interested in exploring getting this into Glow Blogs. I’ve been asked about this sort of functionality a few times.

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Listened How will AI change your life? AI Now Institute founders Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker explain. from Recode

Listened to Artificial intelligence explained on Kara Swisher Recode Decode podcast – Recode

Instead of talking about far-flung super-intelligent AI, they argued on the latest episode of Recode Decode, we should be talking about the ways AI is affecting people right now, in everything from education to policing to hiring. Rather than killer robots, you should be concerned about what happens to your résumé when it hits a program like the one Amazon tried to build.

“They took two years to design, essentially, an AI automatic résumé scanner,” Crawford said. “And they found that it was so biased against any female applicant that if you even had the word ‘woman’ on your résumé that it went to the bottom of the pile.”

Great listen. The comparison of how China is implementing AI, at a national level, compared to the huge corporations made me think.

You’re looking at a set of practices, in that case, that is pretty similar to a social credit score in China, but under different auspices. The public is not aware, there is no process of acknowledgement or consent there. This is happening sort of under the cover of proprietary private sector tech that is actually not disclosed to the people that it’s going to affect.

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Bookmarked “Bullshit and the Art of Crap -Detection” by Neil Postman (media.usm.maine.edu)
As I see it, the best things schools can do for kids is to help them learn how to distinguish useful talk from bullshit. I think almost all serious people understand that about 90% of all that goes on in school is practically useless, so what I am saying would not require the displacement of anything that is especially worthwhile.

Found in this tweet by @MarkRPriestley.

My link is to a pdf of the talk from 1969.

Postman also wrote ‎kairosschool.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Teaching-as-a-Subversive-Activity.pdf.

A good fun read with many cringe points, which of the forms of BS have you used? I’ve used a lot.

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Bookmarked Nothing Fails Like Success by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (Read Write Collect)
Jeffery Zeldman argues that in being unable to pay mortgage associated with the web, we have become indebted to the mob that is platform capitalism. This has led us into the money trap, which demands unrealistic rewards that care more about clicks than community. Zeldman’s suggestion on how to fix...

Aaron points to Nothing Fails Like Success (A List Apart).  

Aaron links to several fellow travellers reactions that make great reading too.

Aaron’s own blogging has gone a long way along the IndieWeb path and is a excellent one to follow.

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I’ve found Office Lens useful over the last few year in class. It is a good way to get some text into a document for editing. The workflow for me is a wee bit clunky, snap on phone, open app, upload. Then either open in word or switch to desktop and open from OneDrive there when it syncs.

Today I found OCR.space a free online service. I gave it a quick try on my phone.

The first attempt failed, I had to edit the photo to B&W and brighten it a little (as per screenshots above), but the results were impressively quick. There was no swapping back and forward between apps.

I’ve tried a multi-column image too using the same image I used back in 2015 with office lens. The results are just as good and fit my preference for text I can copy as opposed to a document I need to open.

Here is the docx Office Lens converted, and here is the OCR.space one, from This image, I had to shrink it a bit to get under 5mb for ocr.space, I don’t think Id need to do that iif I was going straight from the phone when the image would be a smaller png.

I hope to give ocr.space a test in the real world next term.

I’ve also found dictation on my phone a great way to get documents into text. Reading someone elses words seems to work better for me that thinking up my own as I go.

I found ocr.space via OCR Shortcut : shortcuts on reddit, butI’ve not tried the shortcut, the webpages seems quick enough.

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A few children in my class need a bit of extra support in literacy. On a course at the NLC literacy base I was shown the idea of scribing sentences and then cutting them up. The result could be given to pupils to sort out on a wee board with slots and then optionally copied into a jotter.

Given my poor handwriting (unless I really slow down), difficulty in keeping resources organised and liking for digital I had a go at making a virtual version.

The first iteration just presents a field, typing a sentence and hitting return produces mixed up words to drag around. I’ve been using that for a couple of months.

I’ve then improved things a little by making a system to create links to that page that will have a particular sentence already created. Example

I’ve been sending these links out via Airdrop either directly on a few together in a note. I though I might make the page creation a little easier and also add a QR code creator: Mix Up Maker – Make a Cutup sentence or story..

I can then add the QR Codes to my pupils programs. These pupils have daily task sheets put in their jotter.

I am depending on the QR code API and the TinyURL.com API.

As usual the code in there is a bit of a mess. I always think I’ll tidy these things up, but rarely do. I need more time than I seem to have to really learn JavaScript so I continue to type and test.

The gifs above are made with LICEcap which does a great job of creating short gif ‘screencasts’.

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Audio from my conversation with Dr. Ian Guest, (@IaninSheffield), yesterday evening is now on Radio Edutalk:

Radio Edutalk 13-03-19 Ian Guest “Exploring teachers’ professional development with Twitter”.

Ian’s approach to research is really interesting and he makes you think more than once about things you take for granted. #EDUtalk.