Category Archives: enviable stuff

Talking about it isn’t good enough / But quoting from it at least demonstrates / The virtue of an art that knows its mind. // Seamus Heaney : Squarings

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I’ve often made an end of year posts reviewing my blogging. I though this year I might review my blog reading. These are a few of the sites I’ve enjoyed. The blogs I try not to miss and some I would love to be able to emulate.

Cogdog blog. Alan’s blog has been a constant in my life for years. Discussing sharing, sharing WordPress code and more wrapped in a real life with a real voice. I follow Alan wherever he roams.

Read Write Collect is my main education hosepipe filter. Aaron reads and comments on a huge range of educational and web tech blogs wrapped in a tasty IndieWeb coating.

I spend more time on the gentle, eclectic Micro.blog community/aggregator than social networks nowadays. @smokey is a one man community engine nearly every week he produces a post with a list of posts and pictures he has picked out. A few of us tried this for a while, as far as I know @smokey is the only one to have kept it up.

I love Tom Woodward’s Weekly Web Harvest which I think might be auto generated from pinboard. The rest of the blog certainly isn’t auto generated but is a must read too.

Scripting News

Tom Smith, I follow across twitter, Instagram and now his blog. Creative Chaos.

ScotEduBlogs, an aggregation of Scottish Educational bloggers. I run this as a gift to the community, but also because it means it is easy to read great stuff from across Scottish education at all levels.

I read a lot more via RSS. My twitter browsing has decreased but I have a couple of private lists one called regular & one for primary classroom folk.

I continue to find some really good resources on twitter. I do wish more of the teachers sharing would use a blog. (much easier to keep track of, organise etc). If they are in Scotland they could join in ScotEduBlogs too.

Featured image from Image from page 285 of “Studies in reading; teacher’s manual” (1919) on flickr no known copyright restrictions.

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Liked Inter-disciplinary curriculum: why is it so difficult to develop? (part one) (Professor Mark Priestley)

These attempts to introduce IDL, and the national guidance that prompted them, have tended to be characterised by a lack of conceptual clarity about inter-disciplinary approaches, leading in many cases to activities that were not really inter-disciplinary, at best being cross-curricular. Public discourse around IDL uses many different terms interchangeably – for example, cross-curricular, integrated, thematic – which are conceptually distinctive but regularly conflated.

Looking forward to the next post:

which will follow in a few days, will explore what needs to be addressed if IDL is to become a practical reality in Scottish schools.

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Liked Must Do Better (Just Trying to be Better Than Yesterday)

…There are loads of issues linked to the poverty gap, health and well-being issues and attainment, but I’m not convinced that school is always the place to solve them…

I am not convince either. Kenny has, as usual, a lot more intelligent things to say on the matter. A good end of year read.

Kenny goes on:

And we need to find a balance between thinking that Scottish Education is going to hell in a handcart and those who refuse to acknowledge that and believe that all is a shiny brochure and a Twitter feed.

 

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Liked #IndieWeb and #WordPress at WordCamp Riverside 2018 by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (BoffoSocko)

If you missed it, here are slides with links and resources for my IndieWeb and WordPress presentation at WordCamp Riverside 2018. Video coming soon. Thanks to everyone who came and participated. I’m happy to answer any additional questions.

Slides Are a great overview of IndieWeb for WordPress. Looking forward to catching the video.

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Daring Fireball: Sometimes It’s Better to Just Start Over With iCloud Photo Library Syncing

Next, I wanted to delete every single photo and video from my iPhone. To my knowledge there is no easy way to do this on the iPhone itself. (There are a lot of tasks like this that are easy on the Mac thanks to Edit → Select All that are painfully tedious on iOS.) I connected the iPhone to my Mac with a Lightning cable and used Image Capture to delete all photos and videos from my phone. Image Capture just treats the iPhone like a regular camera. Image Capture crashed three times during this process (I’m still running MacOS High Sierra 10.13.6, for what it’s worth), but after the fourth run the iPhone had no photos or videos lefp.

I just deleted all the photos from a school iPad yesterday by selecting a couple and the dragging to select the rest. Worked with ~3000 photos but a bit clunky. I’ll use Image Capture in future. It’s an application I don’t remember very often.

In a 1-2-1 iPad class I do get a lot of benefit from having a mac in school. There a several things that can be solved with a quick airdrop to the mac and back. Given the iPads and mac are of similar vintage (2012).

I’ll edit a note on the mac, it syncs to the iPad (instantaneously it feels like) and I can Airdrop to class or group via classroom app. Now the Classroom app is available for the mac I need to think about upgrading the ageing mac to Mojave. I think it is new enough but spinning hard disk and skimpy ram might be a problem?

Replied to The anti-cottonwool schools where kids stare down risk in favour of nature play by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (Read Write Collect)

This article from the ABC discusses a couple of schools in Western Australia that have reduced the rules on outdoor play. THis reminds me of Narissa Leung’s use of old bricks and Adrian Camm’s use of odd material to enage with play.

 

The school has just three rules — no stacking milk creates, no walking on the large wooden spools and no tying rope to yourself.

That is pretty much how our playground at Banton works. We do stack crates though;-)

https://twitter.com/Banton_Pr/status/1009405794255888389