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 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.

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The tabs left open from yesterday. The internet is a more fascinating place that I’ve got time for.

Worth mentioning that a lot of these links are coming from micro.blog as well as my RSS reader.

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  • 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.

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But there is something about an informal collection of independent blogs by people with a shared passion that makes for a much better micro-community experience than social networks or other online group platforms. I’ve experienced this first-hand with a couple of blogging communities I’ve participated in: an informal network of blogs by adoptive parents and the pen and paper enthusiast blog community.

Micro.blog and Micro-Communities

I’ve had a huge amount of learning and pleasure out of both tightly bound and loose knit online communities. Doug’s post shows how of a network of Blogs owned by individuals can be better than a silo and points out the need for hashtags or other connective tissue.

Micro blogs with webmentions one part of improving the online conversation. A method or methods for discovery and group participation would be another.

I can’t recommend micro.blog enough. It has really helped me think about my online activity in many new ways. You can get involved for free and lose nothing by joining and playing.

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Bookmarked

  • Teaching Students to Legally Use Images Online | Cult of PedagogyMight be a nice guide to copyright.

    OPTION 1: MAKE YOUR OWN If students create their own images, then they own the copyright and can use them without having to pay any money or get permission (unless the photos are of someone else…but we’ll get to that).

    I like option 1

  • BBC – KS3 Bitesize History – The First World War : Revision A bit too much detail for my primary pupils, but should be handy for me.
  • WWI Uncut – YouTube – YouTube WWI Uncut BBC series, short programmes. Medical one looks a bit to gory for my younger pupils.
  • World War 2 timeline by lindaayers – Teaching Resources – Tes

    This can be used either as a teaching aid to help with the chronology, or printed off and laminated as a display. I have it hanging on a washing line from my ceiling and the children refer to it quite regularly. Hope it’s useful.

  • E-safey knowledge organiser.docx I am starting to notice some of these knowledge organisers popping up.
  • S3 for Poets
    Might be useful if I ever want to use Amazon S3 storage.

    S3 stands for Simple Storage Service.

    It’s a service provided by Amazon that provides storage and it’s simple. If you look at it the right way. And it’s Tuesday. And there’s a full moon. 🙂

    Simple is in the eye of the beholder. And to a programmer, like me, S3 is simple. But we forget sometimes that what seems simple to us might not seem so simple to a literate person who isn’t a programmer. For example, a poet.

    But poets need to store stuff too, and Amazon provides a great service, so let’s dive in and crash through the obstacles and get to the other side, where storage is simple. Dave Winer, New York August 2012

Image from page 109 of “The manual training school, compri… | Flickr No known copyright restrictions. Somewhat glitched.

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Some of the things I’ve pinned to the board this week.

  • Home – Minetest

    A free, open source voxel game engine and game. Fully extendable. You are in control.

    I installed that on a few PCs in school. Testing it in a lunchtime club. Looks like a free minecraft. Lots of possibilities. I have it running on one pc as a server and the class can connect from different PCs (WE have tested and got it working on mac & windows).

  • Let’s Enhance

    Neural network hallucinates missing details to make image look natural.

    hallucinates is an interesting choice of words.

  • How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You’ve Ever Met

    Behind the Facebook profile you’ve built for yourself is another one, a shadow profile, built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users. Contact information you’ve never given the network gets associated with your account, making it easier for Facebook to more completely map your social connections.

    Not sure if this is incredibly creepy, just the way things are heading or both.

  • That IoT Thing: Bitty Data Logger 3.0

    Bitty Data Logger is an application which can capture and chart data from a BBC micro:bit’s internal accelerometer, magnetometer and temperature sensors. It’s available for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets and for Chromebook as well. Data is, of course, transmitted from the micro:bit to your smartphone over Bluetooth so you can be some distance away from the micro:bit and…. whatever you have connected to it.

    I had a quick test with an earlier version. Lots of possibilities for the classroom, wonder when I’ll get it fitted in.

  • Something is wrong on the internet

    one of the traditional roles of branded content is that it is a trusted source. Whether it’s Peppa Pig on children’s TV or a Disney movie, whatever one’s feelings about the industrial model of entertainment production, they are carefully produced and monitored so that kids are essentially safe watching them, and can be trusted as such. This no longer applies when brand and content are disassociated by the platform, and so known and trusted content provides a seamless gateway to unverified and potentially harmful content.

    There seems to be a myriad of weird videos, automatically or semi-automatically created, earning money. Google have now said they will restrict videos that are flagged: YouTube to restrict ‘disturbing’ children’s videos, if flagged – BBC News. It seems unlikely that will deal with the problem.

Featured image, a bit of processing slit-scanning strangness, guess the source.