Thanks to @wiobyrne’s newsletter for a link. I think I’ll be coming back to this a few times, a rich vein.
I read this Tweet, which subsequently received over 1000 retweets and likes: When teachers love their jobs, kids notice...
Category Archives: enviable stuff
Aaron 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
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
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!
👍 Enjoyed @twoodwar’s WordPress workings.
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.
👍 I enjoyed all 10.
Schools, teachers and learners struggle with challenges in many shapes and forms when it comes to digital portfolios.
Comprehensive look at these challenges. Lots of suggestions.
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.
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.
★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.
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.
After years of letting algorithms make up our minds for us, the time is right to go back to basics.
👍 Another good sign. I’ve been using inoreader for a couple of years, really like it, have a paid account although free would do.