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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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.

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graph of number twitter clients used by schools

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:

  1. download the status in json format
  2. passes it to the jq application (which I had installed in the past) which pulls out a list of the sources.
  3. It is then passed to sed which strips the html tags leaving the text. (I just search for this, I have no idea how works)
  4. next the list is sorted
  5. then uniq pulls out the uniq entries and counts then
  6. Finally sorts the counts and gave:
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"

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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.

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Replied to bookmarked Why I won’t buy an Ipad: ten years later by Aaron DavisAaron 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.

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Henry Hepburn, @Henry_Hepburn interviews Chris Smith, @aap03102, This was a pretty delightful listen for all sorts of reasons. Chris shows a healthy dislike of inservice days;-)

I particularly like the idea that his subject, maths, could be of interest to pupils in itself. Lessons, and activities don’t always need be part of a project, although Chris talked about great ones, or in preparation for a career.

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@vasta on micro.blog posted about satellitestud.io/osm-haiku/app (one of my favourites)

we automated making haikus about places. Looking at every aspect of the surroundings of a point, we can generate a poem about any place in the world.

I’ve been having fun generating random haiku and then matching with photos from my camera roll of the same places.

 

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Liked Cristina Milos on Twitter (Twitter)
“I changed the way I teach new vocabulary. Fewer words, slower process, more effortful, but better understanding and use. #engchat #pypchat”

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Seven years of open | Open Scotland

Over the course of this month, I hope to explore activity in Scotland related to some of these lesser-blogged-about areas of open practice. Given my own role in widening access with the Open University in Scotland, you can expect to hear about projects I’ve been involved with. I am very much hoping that these can be the start of a conversation and would love to hear about – and boost – some of the exciting things you’ve been doing since the Declaration.

Sounds like an interesting development in the Open Scotland world. We don’t talk about OER at school level much, as far as I know, I wish we did.