Category Archives: wwwd

Mostly stuff to do with the classroom & Teaching and learning. Posts that fit with the site’s description: “Teaching, ict, and suchlike”

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How the Internet Archive Has Digitized More than 250,000 78 R.P.M. Records: See the Painstaking Process Up-Close | Open Culture

Pretty amazing project, I’ve only dipped my toe in. almost 30 year’s ago I watched Toto the Hero at the movies. It had a great theme song. Over the years I forgot the film’s name about 10 years decided to find the song. Much googling (I was looking for boom) and I eventually found it on Youtube. Today I found it again but sung in English.

I am sure there are a lot more educational used for this amazing collection of digital music.

NB the archive has a nice WordPress embed:

[archiveorg 78_boum_charles-trenet-trenet_gbia0122226a width=640 height=50 frameborder=0 webkitallowfullscreen=true mozallowfullscreen=true] I set the heigh param to a bit lover than the given 140.

Works in Glow Blogs too.

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Somewhere or other1 I Saw a link to v.2 (1799) – The Naturalist’s Pocket Magazine or compleat cabinet of the curiosities and beauties of nature. Intriguing enough which lead me to discover the Biodiversity Heritage Library:

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL is revolutionizing global research by providing free, worldwide access to knowledge about life on Earth.

About BHL – Information about the Biodiversity Heritage Library

There seems to be a vast collection of biological books that are free to read and download. There is also a twitter account, @BioDivLibrar and an amazing Flickr account: Biodiversity Heritage Library where there are over a quarter of a million images, many public domain. They have also contributed

over 2 million BHL images have been uploaded to the IA Book Images Flickr stream as part of the Art of Life project. These images are identified and uploaded in bulk using an algorithm. They offer a great opportunity for serendipitous discovery via browsing.

from: About Biodiversity Heritage Library | Flickr.

The Library are asking for people to help tag their flickr images and this might be a good activity for secondary pupils?

Bird Bingo


As a primary teacher, once I’d stopped just raking through some beautiful images I knocked up a quick Bird Bingo game for my class to help with bird identification. It has random cards and a caller.

There is page after page of beautiful pictures in the photo stream I defy anyone to leave it quickly. Example page 2094!

Featured Image: n456_w1150 | Natural history of the animal kingdom for the u… | Flickr public domain.

1. I don’t like not being able to attribute where I found this amazing resource.↩

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The Spring Holidays, like others will increase my blogging. It has been a busy term both home learning and back in school. Looking forward to a holiday of wee walks (still stuck in Glasgow) and some random browsing.

The Featured image is Maxwell dynamic machine, 1961 | Science Museum Group Collection © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence found via the Never Been Seen | Science Museum Group Collection page, which I learnt about from Ian Guest

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Every so often I come back to this idea of posting sets of rather random links. I love seeing them pop up on my on this day page. For organisation and discoverability it might be better to post links separately. Mostly in pinboard too.

I checked how many posts I had tagged lifeinlinks and that makes this one number 40.

Featured image, some branches against a blue sky today. convert branches.jpg -scale 900x -colorspace Gray -ordered-dither h4x4a branches.png

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Museo is a visual search engine that connects you with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rijksmuseum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the New York Public Library Digital Collection Every image you find here is in the public domain and completely free to use, although crediting the source institution is recommended!

from: Museo

This looks like another pupil friendly source of images. I’ve added this to the short set on my classes’ links page.

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Reposted a tweet by Banton Primary (Twitter)

Episode 4 of the Banton Biggies Podcast is out now. Scripted & recorded by pupils in their home and edited together by the children in school all in less than a week.https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/nl/bbpod/2021/03/09/bbp-episode-4/

I’d avoided doing this earlier in lockdown ’cause I though it might be tricky. Turned out easier to organise than if I was in class. Even minimal supervision of the edit in school today.

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Windscape is an exciting children’s adventure that explores the dilemma between the usefulness of wind farms and the beautiful scenery they can sometimes destroy.

Paul Murdoch, the author of Windscape has recorded the audio for each chapter, created learning material and made them available for free.

With Paul’s permission I’ve taken the resources and turned it into a Glow Blog.

Windscape – an exciting children’s adventure by Paul Murdoch

and a podcast to which you can subscribe on: apple or android.

I have already started using the resource with my class and am looking forward to continuing.

As the audio is a blog it is easy to change things, we are open to adding to the learning resources if anyone has ideas. You can get in touch through the site.

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Like half the teachers in Scotland I’ve been spending a lot of time in Teams recently 1.
One of the problems I’ve had is pupils not seeing the slides when I use PowerPoint. It is not a PowerPoint problem as we have the same problem with screen sharing and the Whiteboard. Ironically the problem shows up for the children who are in school. I presume a bandwidth problem.

I’ve been working around the problem by taking screenshots as we go through a presentation and pasting into the chat. Somewhat to my surprise this works well.

On a mac ⌘-shift-4 give me a cross hair and if I hold the control key down then I release the mouse the image goes to the clipboard and can be pasted into the Teams chat with ⌘-v.

I’ve found this really quick to do. In fact last session when I ended up using the chat as a presentation tool this time around Teams seems more reliable, but this is stll good for the pupils on the end of a poor connection.

1. Despite my love of tech I can’t say I’ve enjoyed it particularly, I much prefer the physical classroom, I presume the other half of Scots teachers are in Google Meet. ↩
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Bookmarked Re: Get direct download link of a file in OneDrive for Business (TECHCOMMUNITY.MICROSOFT.COM)
Use "Get link", then use "People with existing access" to get the direct link to the file. Then, the url will be direct path to https://org.sharepoint.com/personal/user_org/folder/filename.ext?d=oiuqjaweorihjlkj Now, just remove everything after the ? and put in download=1 and magic happens. https://org.sharepoint.com/personal/user_org/folder/filename.ext?download=1

This works fine with files in Glow OneDrive even for publicly shared files.

I’ve started to use it on my class blog to share files. Here is a simple example. A PowerPoint on my onedrive, publicly shared, the first link is the standard share link, the second has the download parameter.

https://glowscotland-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/gw09johnstonjohn4_glowmail_org_uk/EVaRRmxQ5sdLuGfRss9xM7gBW4hpamdB48iNfKbixRpOUg?e=tegAeu

https://glowscotland-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/gw09johnstonjohn4_glowmail_org_uk/EVaRRmxQ5sdLuGfRss9xM7gBW4hpamdB48iNfKbixRpOUg?Download=1