#SilentSunday
Category Archives: posse
Sunrise over the Banton Playground this morning.
Too Slow. New Year’s Day, I was driving home & stopped by the police. I was going too slow. Asked why, I say, I was listening to a poem on the radio. Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert, it was worth slowing down for.
Read: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka ★★★★★ 📚
Great read. I know almost nothing about Sri Lanka. Surprisingly touching given the setting, the after life, a world of ghosts & demons many the result of political killings.
ChatGPT for Lazy Teachers
I’ve read a bit about ChatGPT use in education, there is a lot about 1
I’ve been kicking the tyres of ChatGPT a little. Even on the surface it is quite interesting.
I have tried a couple of things that might be useful. One is to get some JavaScript functions for a little fun. It did what I wanted. The other was perhaps more pertinent to teaching.
I wanted to knock out a couple of simple cloze procedures, making up sentences is one of the more tedious tasks so I though I’d give ChatGPT a shot. I asked:
Me: can you give me sentences for 10 year old using each of these words feat feet mail male leak leek meat meet ChatGPT: Sure! Here are some sentences using each of these words: "I am so proud of my little sister's feat of climbing to the top of the jungle gym all by herself!" "I can't believe how big my feet have gotten since I was a baby." "I need to go to the post office to mail this letter to my pen pal in France." "My uncle is a male doctor." "There's a small leak in the roof that needs to be fixed before it starts raining." "I love adding sliced leek to my salads for a little extra flavor." "I can't wait to have a barbecue and cook some juicy meat on the grill." "I have to go meet my friend at the library in an hour."
So I needed to fix the spelling of flavor and asked, with typo, as in the screenshot, for another sentence for male. I got a list. I needed to adjust the one I chose to make the lion lazy too.
It was easy enough to paste that into an H5P Fill in the Blanks Content and get a cloze in Glow Blogs.
Diversion to Other Geeky Territory
The Fill in the missing blanks content in H5P takes text with the words you want to be blank surrounded by asterisks. Since I’d copied the sentences into a text editor to replace the quotations, I set the document format to markdown, selected the words and pressed ⌘-i.
I then wondered if I could get ChatGPT to add the asterisks for me, so I asked: with an asterisk before and after each word. This it did, but as it typed then it seems that ChatGPT uses markdown, so as it typed the closing astrisk the enclosed word became italic. So back TextMate for me.
2022 in titles, made with wordcloud cli.
Fox hunting in the long grass, late afternoon on the edge of the Kilpatrick Braes.
Winter Trees, the Kilpatrick Braes
Larch Tree From Below
ScotEduBlogs Revival?
A very interesting read: How a return to blogs and wikis could benefit teachers | Tes
Unlike social media, these older content-creation tools did not restrict the length of contributions or steal your attention every waking moment with incessant dopamine-releasing notifications. Instead, they allowed developing thoughts to be published, ideas shared and shaped, links made to like-minded thinkers, and documents to be written collaboratively – the very values cherished by both luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment and the creator of the web.
And
What was missing in 2010 was any sort of directory: a working record 1 of the many flowering blogs, themes and ideas. A “ScotsEdu” wiki would quickly establish this, editable by all, allowing for information to be updated quickly and providing a map for educators, linking ideas, papers and research.
In short, it would provide a one-stop shop to support an ongoing national discussion about Scottish education.
I saw this article via twitter after a link was tweeted by Ollie Bray. Ironically Ollie was once a very prolific Scottish educational blogger.
A working record
A working record is not missing, but perhaps un-noticed. ScotEduBlogs has a record of posts going back to 2006!
ScotEduBlogs goes back to a Wiki started by Ewan McIntosh on Wikispaces. When the list of blogs became a bit to long to follow by clicking links, we 2 created ScotEduBlogs . At first it consisted of a aggregation of posts from across Scotland and a supporting Wiki. Over the years it has shrunk to an aggregation site now maintained, in a fairly lax fashion, by myself.
The site started aggregating class & teacher blogs. After the move to WordPress I reduced it to ‘professional’ blogs. It had gained some higher education blogs, but the frequency of posts has dropped.
The article made me visit the backend of SEB for the first time in a while. Much to my embarrassment I found a request to join by the TES article’s author Andrew McLaughlin. I’ve now added his blog. The form on the site has failed to send me an email. I added a link to email me requests, which should do as a stopgap.
I took a moment to improve the menus on mobile. I also set up a mastodon account for SEB so that people can get the link to new activity in their mastodon account in the same way as they could follow the twitter account. Given the current twitter woes, I hope the mastodon account will be useful.
It might be time for a revival of ScotEduBlogs. I would be delighted to add more sites. I’d also be interested in any ideas for improving the site
Personally I rarely visit the SEB site, I subscribe to its RSS Feed in my feed reader. This gives me all the news from all the blogs in SEB without having to subscribe to them all individually.