Category Archives: classroom

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Likes The Landscape Artist Andy Goldsworthy Contemplates His Own Natural Decay | The New Yorker by Rebecca Mead.

Other experiments have been similarly challenging, such as putting foraged objects in his mouth and then spitting them out. “As soon as you put a petal or a flower in your mouth, the whole perception of it changes,” he explained, with undisguised glee. “It’s bitter. Is it going to kill me? You know? Until it goes in your mouth, it’s pretty. When it goes in your mouth, it’s ‘Oh, shit.’ I love that.”

The accessibility of his work, and his use of natural materials, means that it is often adopted by elementary-school curricula, and he has learned to smile politely when parents tell him that their kid “made an Andy Goldsworthy” out of sticks, stones, and leaves.

I really enjoyed reading, glad I signed up to read it. I’ve certainly been guilty of encouraging pupils by showing them Andy Goldsworthy’s work. I enjoyed Andy Goldsworthy – Fifty Years in Edinburgh last year.

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Bookmarked Data logging with the BBC micro:bit (microbit.org)
You can use the BBC micro:bit V2 with built-in speaker as a data logger, recording data from its built-in sensors. Data is stored on your micro:bit even when its power source is disconnected.

This looks really interesting. H.T. to @LouiseE_Foreman. The way the data is saved and accessible is very clever.

You can log data from any of the micro:bit inputs; light sensor, temperature sensor, pins, accelerometer, compass, microphone

 

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Liked: Scratch is a big deal | Bryan Braun – Frontend Developer

Interesting take on Scratch by a Developer & parent.

This recent growth has caused Scratch to break into the Tiobe index’s top 20 most popular programming languages. At the time of this post (July 2022) it ranks 21st, above Typescript, Rust, Julia, and other important languages. The Tiobe index is imperfect but there’s clearly something happening here.

Bryan points to some

It’s pretty impressive how ambitious the projects get. Scratchers often build copycats of “real” games like Cut the Rope, Super Mario Bros, and Terraria. Features like cloud variables allow them to make online multiplayer games, like Taco Burp (popular in my house)

This is quite a different degree of scratching than I’ve seen in my and other classroom recently.

The REST APIs enable third-party tooling like Turbowarp—a parallel site that can run Scratch projects 20x faster.

 

A bit clicking leads to Paper Minecraft v11.6 (Minecraft 2D) on Scratch!

A lot of food for thought, I never spend much time with scratch beyond preparing and experimenting with the most basic of things. I am not sure it is a rabbit hope I want to peer down for long. I think the simple types of things we do in class are enough for most of the pupils (along with micro:bits, lego and other coding). The advanced projects might be useful to point some of the more confident pupils at.

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Liked A poetry lesson by James Durran (@jdurran)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.

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Replied to One Simple Practice I Will Continue Post-Pandemic. (THE TEMPERED RADICAL)
Like many teachers who have spent the past year teaching virtually, I have had to get used to one sad reality: My eighth grade students rarely turn their cameras on — and very few are willing…

Hi Bill,
This is really interesting. I teach younger kids, primary 6-7 age 9-12 but I saw a gradual spread of turned of camera and lack of audio from my class over our second lockdown at the start of the year. As I was using teams, I used the text chat and got a lot more responses and considered ones using that.
Interestingly some of my class were in school, essential workers kids, there were a lot more vocal I presume because they were sitting in a room together and gained confidence from that.
I do occasionally use online responses in class and I’ll be thinking of easy ways to incorporate that in the future.