There has been discussion of the difficulty of discovering UI features on modern Apple Devices vs Classic mac on apple-centric sites, to which I was nodding my head. Today I notice a pupil’s screen, split view and split undocked keyboard. Features I don’t use and didn’t teach.
I enjoyed listening to this episode on the way home tonight. I’m interested in other ‘slow places’ (food, The Daily Stillness for example) so this was a good listen.
I am not sure why I’ve not listened to this Scottish Educational Podcast before. Now subbed. Hope to listen to the episodes with David Cameron (the provocative education one) soon.
The new Office app simplifies how you work on a phone by combining Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into one app and adds mobile-first features so you can get more done all from one app. This app maintains all the functionality of the existing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint mobile apps but requires far less phone storage than using three separate apps. New features leveraging the camera help you create content in uniquely mobile ways. Additionally, the app includes a new Actions tab so you can accomplish many common mobile tasks without needing to switch between apps.
Works with Glow’s O365 education accounts.
I don’t use office apps on my phone very often except for office lens.
This looks like an interesting development.
The quote above was grabbed with the Image to text function. This seems less powerful than Lens (no immersive reader) but allows you to copy text without a trip to OneDrive/Word which is handy. For my use, as opposed to pupil’s, it should be more useful.
https://twitter.com/DrAWebster/status/1230123232235282433?s=20
Here are some tips for speeding up the process of making simple posts to a Glow Blog
One of the nice things about the WordPress Post Editor is you can customise the elements that you see on the screen.
To make my posting simpler in mobile I’ve removed some elements and dragged the Featured Image section to the top of the right hand column. This makes it appear right under the post content in the mobile view.
You can also collapse section of the editor you don’t need all the time, I’ve notice my pupils do this when using their e-Portfolios.
On my phone I’ve bookmarked the New Post Page on blogs I want to post to.
Im my case I’ve saved it to my home screen so I don’t even need to open my browser and go through my bookmarks.
This means that I can go straight to the new post page. If I am not logged onto Glow I am taken through the RM Unify password screen first. I use the save password facility on my phone to speed this up.
Editing a post with images and text can get a little messy, and therefore slow, on mobile. If I want to make a quick post, I don’t put the images in the editor, but use the featured image feature. This adds an image, typically, to the top of your post, and keeps it clear of the text.
Using my home screen icon, saved password, simplified new post page and a featured image means I can post a twitter sized post and picture in around 90 seconds.
In case you are missing the interaction and publicity of twitter you can of course auto post your blog to twitter using several free services, dlvr.it, IFTTT and Microsoft Flow (using your glow account.)
“ Tried to get educators to adopt @Declara in 2015/16 and @Giveandtakeinc since last Christmas. ...In my experience It's a challenge moving edu folks to other platforms.”
I don’t want to move educators. I’d like to spread the understanding that platforms that you pay for with your attention, and then that attention is manipulated, may not be the best place to direct our pupils data and attention.
A start along that path might be to think of a blog that you either own and control or is owned by a benevolent entity (Scot Gov in this case) is the best place to store your data, memories etc. From there, they can be sent out to social networks.
Ideally, IMO, there would be a benevolent network or system that would eventually work well enough to replace commercial but free, services.
A follow up to yesterday’s post, where I figured out how to extract the source from a list of tweets.
I asked a few folk on twitter if they had lists of schools twitter accounts by LA in twitter list. Andrew Bailey gave me an Angus one and Malcolm Wilson pointed me to William Jenkins who has a pile of lists. I quickly grabbed 18 LAs alone with Andrews to make 20 to run through my script.
The results are above.
I am interest in the result only tangentially. Partially is my idea of fun to figure out how to write the script. Mainly I am interested in thinking about encouraging folk to use Glow Blogs as a primary place they post school and class news as opposed to twitter. I’ve been told a few times that teachers use twitter because it is easier. I want to explain how blogging can be a lot easier. This indicates that mobile devices are the way to go.
I’ve talked to a fair number of teachers who find it easier to use twitter than to blog to share their classroom learning. I’ve been thinking a little of how to make that easier but got side tracked wondering how schools, teachers and classes use twitter.
If you use twitter on the web it tells you the application used to post the tweet. At the bottom of a tweet there is the date and the app that posted the tweet.
I’ve got a list that is made up of North Lanarkshire schools I started when I was supporting ICT in the authority.
I could go down the list and count the methods but I though there might be a better way. I recalled having a played with the twitter api a wee bit so searched for and found: GET lists/statuses — Twitter Developers. I was hoping ther was some sort of console to use, but could not find one, a wee bit more searching found how to authenticate to the api using a token and how to generate that token. Using bearer tokens
It then didn’t take too long to work out how to pull in a pile of status updates from the list using the terminal:
curl --location --request GET 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/lists/statuses.json?list_id=229235515&count=200&max_id=1225829860699930600' --header 'Authorization: Bearer BearerTokenGoesHere'
This gave me a pile of tweets in json format. I had a vague recollection that google sheets could parse json so gave that a go. I had to upload the json somewhere I could import it into a sheet. This felt somewhat clunky. I did see some indications that I could use a script to grab the json in sheets, but though it might be simpler to do it all on my mac. More searching, but I fairly quickly came up with this:
curl --location --request GET 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/lists/statuses.json?list_id=229235515&count=200&' --header 'Authorization: Bearer BearerTokenGoesHere' | jq '.[].source' | sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g' | sort -bnr | uniq -c | sort -bnr
This does the following:
119 "Twitter for iPhone" 28 "Twitter for Android" 22 "Twitter Web App" 8 "Twitter for iPad" 1 "Twitter Web Client"
This surprised me. I use my school iPad to post to twitter and sort of expected iPads to be highest or at least higher.
It maybe that the results are skewed by the Monday, Tuesday holiday and 2 inservice days, so I’ll run this a few times next week and see. You can also use a max_id parameter so I could gather more than 200 (less retweeted content) tweets.
This does give me the idea that it might be worth explaining how to make posting to Glow Blogs simpler using a phone.
Update, Friday, bacn to school and NLC looks like:
74 "Twitter for iPhone" 51 "Twitter for iPad" 18 "Twitter for Android" 10 "Twitter Web App" 1 "dlvr.it"
I gave presentation/workshop to a few groups at the UWS this morning about Glow Blogs. Rather than use a presentation I made a blog: Glow Blogs – An Introduction This goes over some of the basics about Blogging and a few tips. Far too much to cover in an hour.
It may be useful to you if you are learning or explaining about Glow Blogs.
Some of the pages are pretty sketchy, but it was made to be expanded on in person.
Aaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)Reflecting on ten years since the release of the iPad, Cory Doctorow reflects upon the limitations of the device. From the restrictions placed on content to the inability to fix the hardware, iPads are designed to create consumers out of their users.
Hi Aaron,
I’d read the Gruber piece you also linked to to but not Cory Doctorow’s. I agree with much of both in principal. In practise, in my classroom, not so much.
We are 1-2-1 iPad. Half the class have old 2013 iPad Airs that have just stopped handling OS updates. Their batteries are good enough for a day’s use. While we do consume (reading/researching the web, watching videos) they are also pretty creative. Pupils have more freedom to install and customise than they do with our Local Authority managed PCs. They are also very good for mixing with ‘real’ work, messy making, being robust and easier to put down safely that our Windows Laptops (no cables). The go outside too.
