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”

Posted on
by

Likes “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI by Molly White.

Irresponsible AI companies are already imposing huge loads on Wikimedia infrastructure, which is costly both from a pure bandwidth perspective, but also because it requires dedicated engineers to maintain and improve systems to handle the massive automated traffic. And AI companies that do not attribute their responses or otherwise provide any pointers back to Wikipedia prevent users from knowing where that material came from, and do not encourage those users to go visit Wikipedia, where they might then sign up as an editor, or donate after seeing a request for support. (This is most AI companies, by the way. Many AI “visionaries” seem perfectly content to promise that artificial superintelligence is just around the corner, but claim that attribution is somehow a permanently unsolvable problem.)

A good post to read or listen to at the beginning of  Scottish AI in Schools week . The article does not want the stable door closed.

Posted on
by
A montage of 4 webpage screenshots.

Bookmarked for future reading. AI in education is becoming increasingly confusing.

Education Scotland are running a week #ScotAI25: Scottish AI in Schools 2025 with live lessons for pupils & some cpd for staff. I might try to make some of those.

  • This week I’ve used:
    ChatGPT to make some questions up about a passage of text for an individual in my class; Write an example text about levers; create a formula for a number spreadsheet and create a regular expression.
  • Claude to make a fractions matching game and a trivia quiz.
  • I am occasionally using lovable.dev to play around making an alternative way of posting to WordPress.

I might have used ChatGPT a couple more times in school. Although it is accessible the login options didn’t seem to be so I’ve no history to check.

Quite a few teachers I know use it in some of these ways in a, like me, fairly causal way. This is a lot easier than thinking about any ethical and moral implication.

Posted on
by

Recently I saw a post on Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel pointing to a nice 3 column layout for a blog.

Doug wondered :

If you’re reading this and know of a similar blog theme, on any platform, could you let me know?

I thought it would be possible to use the Site Editor on a WordPress block theme and left a comment.

I’ve been watching quite a few WordPress videos from Jamie WP. I especially like his Remaking Famous Websites playlist. So I thought it might be possible to make a WordPress site that looked a bit like garry.net.

Jamie does these in 30 minutes. This took me longer, but I’ve not a whole lot of experience with the site editor. I decided to use Glow Blogs. It is free and easy for me to set up a site there. I serve as part time product owner so this is good practise. The disadvantage is that I can’t install any extra plug-ins or add any custom css1. Glow Blogs also runs a version or so behind WordPress.org.

I only did enough to see where I could go easily. I didn’t attempt to match styles or other features.

I got as far as Three Columns, this is not finished or polised but I managed:

  1. 1. a home page with some static content and a left hand navigation.
  2. a posts page with the same left hand column. A second column listing the posts and loading the latest post in the third column.
  3. finally a single post page with the same first two columns. The post tapped or clicked in the second column showing in the third.

To do this I created three page templates2. All are inside columns. All have the same first column. So I made that one as a pattern3. The second column is used twice, so I made another pattern for that. This stopped me having to fix the same thing in different places. I think this is the right approach.

I’ve ignored mobile and other possible pages. I didn’t touch archive, views for categories and tags for example . My aim was to spend a couple of hours on this.

I had trouble with a few things.

  • I had edited the Front Page Template, which should be used for the posts page. This didn’t show up. When I edit the posts page and then edit the template I see my 3 column. Unfortunately the live page still uses the old template. So given my time limit I just made another page to act as the posts page and made an ‘All posts’ template for that. This has a query loop in the second column, acting as an index for the posts.
  • The second column on the Posts & single post page should ideally scroll all of the posts. Probably inside a fixed height block with lazy load.
  • I think I should have used Template parts when I used patterns. but the result seems the same.
  • I am not sure how to hilight the posts selected in the second column. garry.net does this nicely.
  • I enjoyed poking around in the site editor. I can see the potential for creating different types of site. I am not convinced that access to the Site Editor alone would make much differences to busy teachers with a lot on their plate. Most Glow Blogs stick with the default theme. I am beginning to see how patterns and templates could make things easier for folk.
  1. WordPress multi-sites do not automatically support custom css. The Jetpack plugin used to do this but not anymore. I hope it will be added back in. ↩︎
  2. Well I did that finally, I made lots of mistakes first. ↩︎
  3. Again I did that a more than a few times. I think this should have been a template part rather than a pattern. ↩︎

Posted on
by

If you want to leave some of the more toxic online spaces, I’d recommend a look at micro.one. You can gain ownership, and control over your content. All without the overhead of setting up your own site1.

Blogging is at the heart of Micro.one. Short microblog posts or long-form posts. Photo blogs or podcasts. Inspired by IndieWeb principles. Your own domain name where you can own your content, then feed your posts into the Micro.one social timeline or the larger fediverse.

All for $1 a month2.

Micro.one is part of the fediverse. When you post to your blog, your posts and photos are also sent to followers on Mastodon and elsewhere.

Micro.one is a ‘subset’ of micro.blog, which is also a relaxed and charming community.

  1. Of course some of us like setting up or own sites;-) ↩︎
  2. If you are Scottish educator I’d recommend Glow Blogs £0 ↩︎

Posted on
by

The Advent calendar in Glow Blogs has now 15 wee activities for mid-upper primary. 5 minutes of Christmas fun or a brain break for each day. New ones appear at 1 minute past midnight.

I have learnt a bit about the Site Editor when making the Calendar page. I used the new, to Glow, Grid Block. Each grid contains a group with a display post shortcode. The Display posts plugin allows me to show a thumbnail for the post published on a particular day. If there are no posts it just shows text of my choice. In this case ‘wait for the date’. The posts are queued up by scheduling.

There is an Advent Calendar in H5P itself, but I like the display post approach.

Each post has a simple H5P activity. Matching games, quizzes and the like.The Site Editor in Glow blogs is a really powerful tool for creating different looks. I’ve enjoyed testing the cover block a bit this weekend.

Posted on
by

Listened to: Learning Conversations Artificial Intelligence with Ollie Bray | Education Scotland podcast

This is the first Education Scotland podcast episode I’ve listened to. Solid food for thought. I’ve not developed any really solid ideas around AI in education but this helped me think of some questions. Ollie compared the uptake and development to AI to other technologies:

So the take up rate of generative AI, like ChatGTP, has been far quicker than people signing up to Facebook, you know, people adopting the internet, people getting a television, people getting radio, etc.

There was discussion of some ways that AI is already being used in schools including what Ollie described as lots of schools doing really, really good work around the ethics of AI.

I wonder what aspects of ethics are being discussed? The one I’ve thought of most is already out of the stable. All the material scraped by AI before we got a chance to choose. I’m not particularly worried about anything I put online being gobbled up by AI, but I imagine it would be more of concern for artists and writers who earn a living from content?

I think we also need to consider the ethics of all application & services we use in education. Especially when application make educational design decisions or have unethical behaviour1.

An interesting point was around developing AI to recreate traditional methods of education, but arguably in more efficient way. Ollie thinks that is probably missing how do we use the technology to do things that were unimaginable before?

I’ve read a bit about using AI in schools for report writing, analysing pupil data and the like and seen a few educational AI startups offering that sort of service. Most of the teachers I’ve talked to, like myself, have used it in a very basic way, cutting down some time in making a quiz or other classroom resources. We are just using ChartGPT, Copilot. etc in as fairly simplistic way.

The podcast talked about the need to update the Scottish Government’s technologies for learning strategy mentioning that it would take 10 years to bring this to publication. I can see a bit of a mismatch with the speed that technology is developing, especially AI. Can we plan that far ahead?

I used the AI application Aiko to generate the transcript to get the quotes.

  1. Thinking about X/Twitter, see Can democracy survive now the world’s richest man has it in his sights? | George Monbiot | The Guardian should we be using X with learners or at all given Mr Musk’s reinstatement of horrors & obliging censorship of government critics? ↩︎