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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  • 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.

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Grist from the pinboard.

  • Creativity and digital technology So the digital is a less creative arena?

    Gardner and Davis suggested that the pre-packaged resources (no matter how vast) made available to young people through the Internet is limiting exercise of the imagination because (as Marvel has shown again and again) it is easier to repackage an existing idea than come up with a new one

  • A Selection of micro:bit Projects – Maker Space

    A lot of these projects involve connecting the micro:bit to other bits and pieces; such as buzzers, or LEDs. However, we start off with a really simple project which just uses the micro:bit on its own

  • The Case Against Automated Student Data Dashboards | EdSurge News

    We tried to inspire reflection, but it often happened separate from learning. At the end of the semester, we’d ask students about their strengths and weaknesses, and what they could do differently next semester. They would write down a few ideas, but were never asked to come back to them. It became an activity that yielded little impact.

  • Teachable Machine silly practical machine learning. Would be a good demo.
  • Educators in Indieweb twitter list Thanks to indiewebber Chris Aldrich for a interesting slice of educators on twitter.
  • Analyze | Webbkoll – dataskydd.net

    This tool helps you check what data-protecting measures a site has taken to help you exercise control over your privacy. Read more.

    One of the many links from the next one.

  • Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web – Neustadt.fr

    We’re quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it.

    Lots of information and links clearly spelt out. Tempted to quote all of it, but just one more.

    Pay for services and content that you like, if you are able. If you like reading The Guardian, for example, consider subscribing. If your favourite YouTube channel is on Patreon, consider pledging a small amount per video. If you like services like Pinboard.in that charge in return for a useful service, buy it. There’s mutual respect when both the user and the service provider know what basic service they are buying/selling.

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Liked IndieWeb: The Book (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)
For a quite a while I’ve been thinking about writing a book about the IndieWeb to provide a broader overview of what it is philosophically, how it works, how its community functions, and most specifically how the average person can more easily become a part of it.

This should be very useful. I’ve been trying various indieweb things for a while, but still find it tricky to understand and implement some of the technologies. There is a great wiki, but I think I am more likely to read through a book.

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Some things that have caught my interest over the last week:

  • Good Teachers Talk: Better Teachers Listen | Class Teaching The post is more interesting, to me, than the title.

    One way of achieving this identify shift is to come unprepared to a lesson! For example, working on a poem in English that neither the pupils nor the teacher have read before. In doing so, pupils begin to see that their identities can fluctuate from learner to contributor, thus giving them the confidence to enact this discourse themselves in the classroom and beyond.

    Which speaks to vocalising your process. I do that (I hope) in writing, but not so much in reading.

  • School walls are oozing with unhelpful growth mindset cheese…. | teacherhead

    Get these slogans blown up and laminated and plaster your corridors and walls in them… Bingo! Go Growth Mindset

    And

    Live it. Don’t laminate it. Stick that on a poster

    .

  • Developing a Proper Growth Mindset – The Educator Blog

    False Growth Mindset

    After the recent pushback on Growth Mindset this post suggests that there can be real Growth Mindset and “Many of the best teachers are already there”

  • Online training – Raspberry Pi We recently launched a new way for people to learn about computing with the Raspberry Pi Foundation: free online training courses, available to anyone, anywhere in the world!
  • How to Live Without Google Google trackers have been found on 75% of the top million websites. This means they are not only tracking what you search for, they’re also tracking which websites you visit, and using all your data for ads that follow you around the internet.
  • Physical Computing With Scratch | Raspberry Pi Projects

    The version of Scratch included with the Raspberry Pi has a number of unique features; one of the most useful is its ability to communicate with the GPIO pins (General Purpose Input Output). These pins allow you to connect your Raspberry Pi to a range of devices, from lights and motors to buttons and sensors. The original Raspberry Pi had a 26-pin header and newer models (B+, Pi 2, Pi 3, etc) have a 40-pin header, but this workshop will work with any model.

    I’ve generally failed with any raspberry pi stuff that involves extra hardware beyond a camera this might help.

  • Simple Scratch intruder alarm « Blog My Wiki!

    uses any old Raspberry Pi with Raspbian and some parts you’d find in a CamJam EduKit or similar: an LED, a resistor, a push-button switch, a buzzer and a Passive Infra Red (PIR) movement sensor wired up

    Looks like it might be a nice we project for school.

  • Fragmentum – A microcast from Adam Procter A new microcast. Glad to see a education one appearing.
  • Clips – Google Drive lesson plan to use clips to produced short, 30 sec, movie about a country.
  • Spreadsheets – Google Drive Resources for teaching spreadsheets. Year 5 (England)
  • iOS Keynote is so darn cool! – Learners Together: Teaching with Technology Animated presentations for six word stories.

 
Featured image: Got Links? | On some large road machine from Gila County AZ | Alan Levine | Flickr CC-BY