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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montage of six webpages listed in article

Craig Mod on The Talk Show

Interesting take on the morality of using AI

But I have a hard time parsing out what is moral or amoral about how this stuff is being used, or how the information’s been gleaned, or whatever it’s been sucked up from.

-✂️ snip-

00:03:25 ◼ ► I don’t use any of the photo generation crap or whatever.

00:03:28 ◼ ► What I do think is profound, and I feel like it’s way more morally defensible, is the code generation stuff, just because of all the open source stuff, yada, yada

The Talk Show ✪: Ep. 421, With Craig Mod

The Sea

▶︎ The Sea | Francisco del Pino/Charlotte Mundy | Notice Recordings

wilding.radio

From the famous Knapp estate via Joe

we have installed a solar-powered, quadrophonic live audio feed just north of the dam: A pair of hydrophones brings us closer to the sounds of the water itself and reveals the tiny sounds of fresh-water organisms. A pair of microphones in a fallen willow tree let us get to know the birds and mammals that live near and visit the water and hear the play of weather in the trees.

wilding.radio

Organic Maps

I’ve installed this on my phone with the intention of giving it a shot for recording walks.

Organic Maps is a privacy-focused offline maps & GPS app for hiking, cycling, biking, and driving. Absolutely free. No ads. No tracking. Developed with love by the open-source community. Powered by OpenStreetMap data.

Organic Maps is one of the few applications nowadays that supports 100% of features without an active Internet connection. Install Organic Maps, download maps, throw away your SIM card, and go for a weeklong trip on a single battery charge without any byte sent to the network.

Organic Maps: Offline Hike, Bike, Trails and Navigation

Poetry on the line

Quite delightful raspberry pi project.

 a vintage phone brought to life with Raspberry Pi

Poetry on the line: a vintage phone brought to life with Raspberry Pi – Raspberry Pi

My ‘secret strings’ game to unlock ‘texts’ 

Looks like a good classroom activity.I’ve done similar occasionally but the prompt is much better than mine.

 You tell the children/students that they are going to be poem or story ‘detectives’ and their job is find the ‘secret strings’ in a poem or story – or play or any ‘text’.

Secret strings run within texts linking words, phrases, sentences and pictures or ‘images’. The students’ job is to find them. 

Sometimes the link is to do with sound – eg alliteration, assonance, rhythm, rhyme, repetition, long phrases, short phrases. 

Michael Rosen: My ‘secret strings’ game to unlock ‘texts’ (stories, poems, plays, non-fiction etc)

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I’ve thought about joining in with the indieweb carnival a few times, but procrastinated. This months struck me, May 2025 IndieWeb Carnival: Small Web Communities – uncountable thoughts.

I’d love to hear your experiences of them, why and how you participate and what you think are the key ingredients for a successful small web community.

I didn’t start using digital technology until I was in my 30s (the 1990s). A primary school teacher, I got interested in using our Macintosh pizza boxes when I realised they could produce worksheets that took less time and looked better than Banda ones. I missed out on bulletin boards, myspace and live journal. Over the years I’ve have been involved in a few small web communities that have had great effects on me. My experience has been nearly completely positive.

AOL HyperCard forum

The first community. I discovered was the A.O.L HyperCard forum. I had borrowed a school Mac for the summer holiday and a neighbour had showed me HyperCard and l fell in love with the program.

Shortly after that I got access to the internet via AOL which included various forum. The only one I can recall was the HyperCard one. It was a great model of the best of online community behaviour. In the few years I was involved, I think that it might have included a transition to a mailing list, I can’t remember any snark. I do recall getting tons of help and advice for the start. This encouraged me to join in and help too when I could.

Joining a mature, confident community was a great place to start. A lot of the participants were old hands at online communication, the culture was not so much stated but exemplified.

ScotEduBlogs

The next small community was one I had more to do with setting up. Round about 2005, I extended my class blog where my pupils posted about their learning and started an educational blog myself. There was a small number of other teachers and educators blogging at that time. Driven by Ewan Macintosh, a community of bloggers grew up, initially round a wiki that collected links to blogs. Just before Twitter this lead to a flowering of blogging and commenting. We ran courses for teachers on blogging, meet-ups and eventually the TeachMeet idea appeared.

SEB, as I think of it, worked, while it did because it was driven by individuals, excited by using technologies in the classroom and pleased to find fellow practitioners who thought along the same lines. It was not that long ago but everyone was not online and certainly not all of the time.

I became involved in an aggregation project, which still limps along at ScotEduBlogs.org.uk, now a WordPress site, that still aggregates a dwindling number of rss feeds.

For a while this loose community was great, but it slowly dissolved into twitter & Facebook.

DS106

Ds106 has been the most exciting & creative community I’ve belonged to. Hard to describe, in part an aggregation of rss feeds in part a hashtag. DS106 is sometimes described as an open online course and sometimes a cult. It started as a Digital Storytelling course at the University of Mary Washington, but was open to anyone from anywhere to join in a very casual way. I’ve learnt more about using technology, Web 2.0 as was, from DS106 than any of the technology inservice courses I’ve been on. DS106 taught me about RSS and aggregation. I spent a lot of time making gifs too.

DS106 works because of a combination of the infectious energy and enjoyment exemplified by the leaders combined with a very open attitude to other participants having fun too.

micro.blog

I joined micro.blog at the very start. It is a marvellous, and for folk like me who used an existing blog, free service. For the first few years it was also an amazing community for me. I really enjoyed following and commenting with people there. I think some of that this community feeling might have slipped a bit for me. I’ll hopefully get more involved again in the summer.

Micro.blog itself has developed a lot both as a hosting service and what feels like the easiest way to use IndieWeb ideas. My posts now flow through micro.blog to mastodon, blue sky and threads. Micro.blog, and brid.gy pull comments and likes back. Micro.blog, for me, has become the glue to link me to some other larger communities.

The IndieWeb

As far as I can tell I discovered the indieweb in 2014. I’ve been using IndieWeb plug-ins on this site since 2015. I don’t really participate in the forums or other gathering. I’ve left a few comments here and there. I still feel I am somewhere in this community. Or the webbing at least.

As I typo my way through this post I have been breaking off reading some of the submission to this month’s Carnival. Links & blogrolls spiral off in all directions. The meaning of community expands. What an interesting place the smaller web is.

Thanks to Chris Shaw for the prompt.

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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.

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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.

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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. ↩︎

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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 ↩︎

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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.

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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? ↩︎