lt must not be forgotten that the basic law of children's creativitg is that its value lies not in its results, not in the product of creation, but in the process itself. It is not important what children create, but that they do create, that theg exercise and implement their creative imagination. - Vygotsky
Category Archives: enviable stuff
👍 Enjoyed @twoodwar’s WordPress workings.
Please think about stuff like this every time you hear a supposed web developer/ed tech person say “WordPress can’t . . . ” I’m not a skilled web developer and if I can figure out these things many others could do far better. Most supposed limitations are a failure of imagination rather than the technology or the skill. Also take note of how many times I tried things here. Not every one was a complete failure but there were plenty of those and a number that didn’t generate events at all. This stuff doesn’t necessarily come easy to me. Try not to get discouraged. In the future you can fail at entirely new and more complicated things!
👍 I enjoyed all 10.
9) Fads and factionalism – no thanks. Even in my short (5 year) teaching career I have seen things come and go out of favour. Learning styles, mindfulness, multiple intelligences, growth mindsets, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Cheese (I’m pretty sure it was cheese), I’ve been taught them then been told they don’t even exist. There’s probably a grain of truth in most of these things: good lessons should stimulate many of the senses but let’s not turn every teaching point into a song made out of differently-textured smells differentiated 30 ways to accommodate each child’s ‘learning style’. Life’s too short.
Comprehensive look at these challenges. Lots of suggestions.
Schools, teachers and learners struggle with challenges in many shapes and forms when it comes to digital portfolios.
This is a nice idea, I sometimes get webmentions that have interesting contents I see in the email notification but here on the blog it just shows as an avatar with not text. Now I can fix that, example.
Chris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)One can now go to the admin interface for their comments and webmentions (found at the path /wp-admin/edit-comments.php), click on edit for the particular comment they’re changing and then scroll down to reveal a droplist interface to be able to manually change the webmention type.
★Like: Drafting #IndieWeb Principles for the Rest of Us
Although I’ve been playing with some indieweb technology and principals on this blog I’ve not really dug into the details. I footer and fidget rather than read and think. Greg’s rewrite of the principals are interesting. i wonder if they could be ones for the 2nd or 3rd generation indiewebers? I think I am one of these.
Yet to the audience I serve these set of core ideals can chase folks away for being too technical. So I wanted to remix them to see if I get develop the same principles for a non-technical crowd.
Life in Links: you are never on holiday edition
I’ve been on holiday for the last two weeks, the second spent unwell with a sinus infection that made me uninterested in everything bar Lemsip and a bit of netflix.
Feeling a bit better and reviewing my pinboard links. Most seem to be around poetry, maths and micro:bits in the classroom ( I need to get out more).
- New Findings on Tutoring: Four Shockers
tutoring by paraprofessionals (teaching assistants) was at least as effective as tutoring by teachers
Teaching assistants were more effective in reading with small groups than teachers. Due perhaps to being able concentrate on the job in hand without thinking too much about the rest of the class. And:
Tutoring does not work due to individualization alone. It works due to individualization plus nurturing and attention.
Also volunteers were not as effective as assistants (move on not committed in the same way). I’d say a big plus for classroom/pupil/teaching assistants.
- Misty In Roots – Peace & Love 12″ – YouTube
- Results on ReadWriteThink – ReadWriteThink poetry interactive activities, flash based, but might be useful for ideas
- Multiplication Grids One of many interactive and the like for maths on the mathbot.com site. Some Secondary but a lot look useful for primary.
- Controlling a Raspberry Pi via SSH | Rosemary Orchard One of the many links I am finding via micro.blog. This has info for controlling a pi from iOS Workflow app.
- Start Coding with the JavaScript Blocks Editor | micro:bit some microbit it activities for 8+ using the Microsoft blocks editor. looks like could be set of self directed activities. 30 minutes each.
- 5 Ways to Celebrate Poetry | Edutopia
- Teaching with ‘The Lost Words’ – Education With Espresso
The Lost Words is a beautiful book created by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris. It contains not poems, but spells to conjure back certain words which have been ‘lost’.
The first thing worth noting about this spell book is how alluring it is. I felt enticed into immersing myself in the spells and illustrations immediately. You could quite easily lose yourself for days by: soaking in every inch of detail, finding the hidden meanings of the spells and decoding the kennings.
- Plotting live microbit sensor data in Mu | Blog My Wiki!
I decided this would be even neater if you could untether a microbit, so here’s a project where I send accelerometer data as a string wirelessly from one microbit to another plugged into a computer running Mu. It could be great for physics experiments.
- Parts-of-speech.Info – POS tagging online
Enter a complete sentence (no single words!) and click at “POS-tag!”. The tagging works better when grammar and orthography are correct.
Looks useful. I’ve seen a lot about the immersive reader in Word, but it is lacking in the iOS version of word (although present in OneNote). I like the simplicity of this and the warning:
Computers make mistakes too!
- p5.js | home
Hello! p5.js is a JavaScript library that starts with the original goal of Processing, to make coding accessible for artists, designers, educators, and beginners, and reinterprets this for today’s web.
- Sketch Machine Weird gif maker made with above p5.js
- OK Go Sandbox
We want to give teachers whatever tools they need to connect the joy, wonder, and fun in our videos to the underlying concepts that their students are learning.
— DAMIAN KULASH, OK GO
Or maybe we just wanted to have a ton of fun? Quite stunning videos. One Moment esp.
- Digging into the Gutenberg Editor – Jeff Everhart Jeff Everhart
Header image created with above mentioned Sketch Machine.
👍 Another good sign. I’ve been using inoreader for a couple of years, really like it, have a paid account although free would do.
After years of letting algorithms make up our minds for us, the time is right to go back to basics.
A Saturday in Tabs
The tabs left open from yesterday. The internet is a more fascinating place that I’ve got time for.
- The Archive (macOS) • Zettelkasten Method Looks like an interesting application for organising text. I keep a lot of stuff in txt files which very badly organised (I use search). This might be helpful. I am using the 60 day trial at the moment.
- PressED – A WordPress and Education, Pedagogy and Research Conference on Twitter I am taking part in this on Thursday this week.
- Little grebe – Wikipedia Enjoying watching these on the Victoria Park pond at the moment.
- I am the Weekend – Beta Teacher Not read this yet.
- Doc Searls Weblog · Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what’s coming for all of online publishing
- The science of revision: nine ways pupils can revise for exams more effectively | Teacher Network | The Guardian
- John Sexton on Twitter: “is it just me – why are schools/teachers giving instruction to pupils via twitter? Many primary school – no one under 13 should be on twitter? Better ways to engage with pupils on line – I am sure Or am I missing something here???????” Nearly a month since John tweeted this. Still thinking about it.
- Read Write Respond – Read is to write, write is to respond. I find my self on Aaron Davis’ blog a lot these days. He is doing what I’d like to do if I could squeeze a few more hours into a day exploring the IndieWeb. Great to see a edublogger diving deep into this stuff.
- Ep. 74 Damien Williams “We Built It From Us” – Team Human A lin from Arron, I’ve bookmarked this podcast as it links with John’s tweet above.
- Creating a Deliberate Social Media Space for Students in School – Read Write Respond Another one from Arron, even more on social media in schools.
- A Walk In The Park | Checking out a couple of photos I posted to my blog with sunlit, just checking how they come through.
- AlphaSmart Neo2 | Jack Baty | Flickr I remember getting some of these in school years ago.
- FILM — Erland Cooper The first is beautiful movie “Solan Goose” (there turn out to be gannets), The music sounds good, I hope to watch/listen to the rest later.
- The people owned the web, tech giants stole it. This is how we take it back | Jonathan Freedland | Opinion | The Guardian this is linked everywhere, not too much on how we take it back but the Indieweb points the way.
Worth mentioning that a lot of these links are coming from micro.blog as well as my RSS reader.
Life in Links 28-01-2018
- DarkSiteFinder.com – Light Pollution Map Quite an amazing map. I think I can get fairly dark in about an hours drive from home. Some people are not so lucky. I’ve not seem the milky way for years. I used to see it all the time when I was a child and teen. Hopefully fix that sometime this year.
- Designing Emotion: How Facebook Affordances Give Us The Blues – Cyborgology
Facebook’s design features work in several ways to reinforce status quo ideas and popular people while maintaining an ancillary status for those on the margins. Given findings about the psychological effects of production versus consumption, these features then have behavioral consequences and in turn, emotional ones.
I find this sort of think fascinating. How we are affected by software. By design or as a side effect.
- Comic Sans: the myths, the lies and the truth about fonts
The big question of this article, then, has a clear answer: Comic Sans use should not be justified by claims of increased readability or benefits to dyslexic students or indeed for handwriting, but if you just like it, and your pupils like it, there is no good reason you should not use it. Or not use most other fonts for that matter. Font choice, it seems, is the least of your worries.
I’ve always followed the general prejudice against Comic Sans, but I use the similar chalkboard more often than not when making resources for pupils. In general I just don’t really notice fonts.
- Xeromino’s Pastebin – Pastebin.com A ton of processing scripts. I used one of them this week.
Featured image: a screenshot of the DarkSiteFinder.com map.