👍 More grist.
Messenger Kids exudes wholesomeness and good intentions, just as Google did at the beginning, and as Mark Zuckerberg still does in his pious epistles to his disciples.
Category Archives: enviable stuff
Life in Links 19-11-17
- 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.
Life in Links 12-11-17
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.
Life in Links 04-11-2017
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.
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.
Life in Links 20-10-2017
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
Growth Mindset, hmm…
“the chance of people replicating this in schools is very small. Carol Dweck told me that they don’t have a single example of a school successfully changing pupils’ mindsets.”
from: Weekend read: Is growth mindset the new learning styles?
I’ve not really paid much attention to Growth Mindset. I missed Carol Dweck the year she was at SLF but I remember a lot of excitement.
More from the post a quote from Carol Dweck:
“I was asked once, ‘What keeps you up at night?’ It’s the idea that my work – which was designed in opposition to the self-esteem movement – would be used in the way that the self-esteem movement is used.”
Interesting read and Carol Dweck will be a guest on the Tes Podagogy podcast on 18 October I think I’ll huffduff that for a listen.
I think this is why I blog…
I think this is why I blog…
Yes, on one hand, it might help someone else learn a trick or an approach. Yet I think there is more- in the retelling of the making, I get to reflect more closely on what I did, how I went about it. Explaining it is for other people, but as much as a reflective practice for myself. I almost re-do the making, and often think about what I might have done better.
from: The Good, The Bad, and The Puppy (and some pondering on Making / Making of) – CogDogBlog
Even if no one is reading. Thanks Alan.
I am often asked about the adoption of Chromebooks and have spent months agonizing how to respond. This article offers food for thought to teachers, administrators, school board members, and policy…
Fascinating article, I’ve always felt that I’d rather do interesting things on native appplication as opposed to a browser. I’ve not spent enough time with chromebooks to agree or disagree but plenty of provocations here.
Tech’s push to teach coding isn’t about kids’ success – it’s about cutting wages much tweeted but well worth a read. Especially the point about neoliberal school reform.