James Durran (@jdurran) (James Durran)An account of a poetry lesson, with some thoughts on efficiency, on how we treat texts and on knowledge.
efficiency in teaching is a problematic idea. Of course time and energy shouldn’t be evaporated away by gimmickry or activity with no purpose. But an element of theatre, an injection of emotion, or a playful unwrapping of ideas can be worth the time if ideas are more memorably imprinted or are more deeply understood.
Interesting post in relation to knowledge, exploratory learning. I’ll be revisiting the blog for the primary section which looks really valuable.
Bribing children is so tempting. What they want, especially when they're young, is sometimes so cheap, so easy to acquire, that the temptati...
Found via @dgilmour.
50 years ago, Edward Deci gave different groups of students a Soma cube puzzle to solve. Some were paid to take part, others weren’t. When he announced that the time was up, the students that were paid to work on the task just put the cube down and walked away.
David’s tweet also lead to
Comments on ClassDojo controversy and Killer Apps for the Classroom? by Ben Williamson
I’ve never been a great one for points and the like in class, mostly due to my inability to be consistent enough in their use and unexamined distaste.
There are echos in the Doing Data Differently project. I’ve been listening to some of the colloquium videos and finding them though provoking.
I’ve read a few AI things recently. I can’t say I’ve got my head round it. A few bookmarks:
Donald Clark Plan B: GPT-3 is like looking into the future What a time to be living.
I couldn’t tell the difference between Wallace Stephens and a bot. Interestingly my wife could, she pointed out that reading out loud made the human poet easier to pick.
Not just words: Let’s talk about that GPT-3 AI tweet that shook designers to the core
Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.
You can have fun with the previous GPT-2:
Write With Transformer
A bit of a tab dump:
Miso Dengaku (Tofu, Eggplant, Daikon & Konnyaku) 味噌田楽 • Just One Cookbook I’ve dipped my spoon into this site a few times, horrible number of popups, but tasty.
Panelle al Forno (Baked chick pea flour gnocchi) Recipe I’ve eaten a lot of chickpea flour over lockdown, Panelle, pancakes, rissoles
Rathad an Isein. A Lewis moorland glossary by Anne Campbell. – peat cultures
Rathad an Isein The Bird’s Road. A Lewis Moorland Glossary.
Sexy Peat / Tìr mo Rùin | Artists’ diaries from the Lewis Peatlands
Artists’ diaries from the Lewis Peatlands
See how a modern neural network auto-completes your text 🤗
This site, built by the Hugging Face team, lets you write a whole document directly from your browser, and you can trigger the Transformer anywhere using the Tab key. It’s like having a smart machine that completes your thoughts 😀
The Big Butterfly Count is a UK-wide survey aimed at helping us assess the health of our environment simply by counting the amount and type of butterflies (and some day-flying moths) we see.
‘Scotland small?’ by Hugh MacDiarmid | Scottish Poetry Library
Japanese White Eye – Limited Edition Fine Art Print | Richard Spare
Drypoint and watercolour
Somerset JPP Textured White 300gsm cotton paper
Image Size: 150 x 125mm
Paper Size: 285 x 255mm
enviro:bit micro:bit Kit – Pimoroni Store
Make a friendly weather station to sit on your windowsill, that keeps track of temperature, pressure, humidity, light and colour, and sound. A perfect way to introduce kids to sensors and science.
Saving this here for following up after the summer break.
The concept had passed me by somehow until Mr Dorman from the @PedagogyTeamNLC introduced them to my class, which very much enjoyed by the children. I had planned on thinking about this a bit more, but other things happened.
Today Arron’s bookmark reminded me and took me to Librarians turned Google Forms into the unlikely platform for virtual escape rooms which links to this example: Hogwarts Digital Escape Room.
I’ve seem a few examples using OneNote and google forms before but this is probably the smoothest experience.
I had wondered if using password protected WordPress posts or pages would work.
I even make a simple set up Make an Escape which produces a sort of digital multi lock (all the answers are 123) before lockdown.
Today I started doing a little reading following Arron’s links, Breakout EDU Additional Game Creator Lab Resources – bit.ly/boeduresources – Google Slides looks as if it is worth borrowing from.
I have been working for years. on a four-line poem. about the life of a leaf; I think it might come out right this winter
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.
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.
Created by Automattic and linked to by @manton who says:
I love this video from WordPress. Very similar in style to what I always imagined we could do for Micro.blog.
A hit of space to light out for the Territory at the end too.
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.
