Category Archives: enviable stuff

Links/bookmarks/likes

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

Posted on
by
Liked Code Strip (Flickr)
This is the strip of code characters that appeared in the Shooting Code Across the Void photo next in this photostream. NB: I had difficulty uploading it, probably due to the aspect ratio (10000 x 300 pixels), it didn't "look like a valid photo". Tried resizing it, and it finally worked if I made it taller (10000 x 1000), but I didn't like the looks. However, when I used the "replace" function from the image page, flickr allowed me to upload my original long photo. Lesson learned: try all available methods until one works!

👍 Lesson learned: try all available methods until one works!

Posted on
by
Liked Excellent teachers in an age of fads by Mark Enser (Teaching it Real)
Many things that get labelled as “fads” might work for an individual teacher (although many things might work better) but they only become fads when divorced from their original meaning and then are spread around and are imposed on other teachers.

I’ve always been interested in the idea that changing almost anything in the classroom will lead to improvement. This post digs around the territory. We probably teach at our best when we are enthused and the beginning of a fad is enthusiasm.

Posted on
by
Bookmarked http://bionicteaching.com/screen-time/ by Tom Woodward (bionicteaching.com)
Every time I hear something about limiting screen time I cannot help but think about how poorly the concept has been thought out. If we talked about “food time” instead maybe that would help us think that while time matters (eating for hours each day is probably a bad idea), how long you eat p...

@twoodwar’s  tasty analogy for thinking about this.

Posted on
by
Liked Eric Schilling on Twitter (Twitter)
“Tinkering with realtime world creation in @Scratch. Character on the screen is coded to interact with different colored objects. (Black is floor. Red is lava. Green is the goal.) Kids can be creating and coding these worlds simultaneously in realtime. https://t.co/giiR6HCmNR”

I want to track this to see if the “how to” requests get an answer. Looks clever. Might not need much kit?

Posted on
by
  • 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.