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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I’ve often made an end of year posts reviewing my blogging. I though this year I might review my blog reading. These are a few of the sites I’ve enjoyed. The blogs I try not to miss and some I would love to be able to emulate.

Cogdog blog. Alan’s blog has been a constant in my life for years. Discussing sharing, sharing WordPress code and more wrapped in a real life with a real voice. I follow Alan wherever he roams.

Read Write Collect is my main education hosepipe filter. Aaron reads and comments on a huge range of educational and web tech blogs wrapped in a tasty IndieWeb coating.

I spend more time on the gentle, eclectic Micro.blog community/aggregator than social networks nowadays. @smokey is a one man community engine nearly every week he produces a post with a list of posts and pictures he has picked out. A few of us tried this for a while, as far as I know @smokey is the only one to have kept it up.

I love Tom Woodward’s Weekly Web Harvest which I think might be auto generated from pinboard. The rest of the blog certainly isn’t auto generated but is a must read too.

Scripting News

Tom Smith, I follow across twitter, Instagram and now his blog. Creative Chaos.

ScotEduBlogs, an aggregation of Scottish Educational bloggers. I run this as a gift to the community, but also because it means it is easy to read great stuff from across Scottish education at all levels.

I read a lot more via RSS. My twitter browsing has decreased but I have a couple of private lists one called regular & one for primary classroom folk.

I continue to find some really good resources on twitter. I do wish more of the teachers sharing would use a blog. (much easier to keep track of, organise etc). If they are in Scotland they could join in ScotEduBlogs too.

Featured image from Image from page 285 of “Studies in reading; teacher’s manual” (1919) on flickr no known copyright restrictions.

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Not because my photos are in anyway professional, but because of the wonderful things Flickr does. Flickr allows me to store and organise my photos. I can look at pictures by friends, acquaintances and all sorts of groups.

Most importantly Flickr curates and organises creative commons licensed and public domain photos. These are searchable and Flickr give access to them via an API that is useful and usable by non-professionals. I’ve had an amazing amount of fun and use (professionally as a teacher). To me Flickr is an important part of the web, I have a pro account to support that.

If you use Flickr and don’t have a pro account you can get 25% off with the code 25in2019 or use this link.

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Nearly a year ago I posted Reading Self Assessment Workflows. I continued to have my pupils record themselves reading, self-assess and send to me. I think it is a valuable activity.

I’ve simplified the workflow slightly when Apple started including Voice Memos on iPads. It is not as interesting app as BossJock jr, but that is an advantage. It does one thing well. I think I prefer apps that do that and can connect to others as opposed to more complex apps.

This is the workflow for pupils:

  1. Record reading in Voice Memos. Change the title from the location to what is read and pupil’s name.
  2. Share to Notes, voice memo is embedded in a note.
  3. Listen to recording, write self assessment in Note. (I have prompt cards to help). I ask the pupils to name and date the note.
  4. Airdrop note to teacher iPad, choosing Classroom rather than user. This is auto accepted and waits in the Classroom app for me to pick up.
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Replied to Laura McEachran on Twitter (Twitter)
“Anyone else love Christmas as much as me?😍🎅🏼 Especially Christmas movies! 🎥 I created these bookmarks using Keynote which have a QR code linking to the clip. They also feature some Film Literacy questions which focus on the 3 C’s and 3 S’s! 🌲🎅🏼 #DigiLearnScot #appleeduchat”

Thanks, a really clever idea. Going to try and fit this in before the break. Great examples of questions to adapt to other seasons, topics.

Until recently I’ve never been a fan of QR codes, preferring to AirDrop Notes with links. But I now appreciate that they do generate a wee bit of extra interest. (I like I can auto create them too, for example).

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A bit of rainy day prep today. Planning using micro:bits for simple Christmas decorations.

Last session we did a time consuming, but worthwhile, microbit guitar project. We’ve use them for decorations before and I thought this might be a simple intro for the new pupils in the class and a simple refresher for last years pupils.

Since I only use microbits now and then I need a wee practise too. I noticed a couple  of things using the iOS app and the MakeCode for micro:bit editor.

The app seems to have improved even since June. At that point we started finding it easy to create code and flash the microbits form our iPads. Today I tried the app on my phone and was surprised as to how easy it was to code (simply) a microbit on my phone.

The other is you can now embed makecode, the code or the emulator. This one is a dice and number picker, we made ones like this for maths games last session. Try the buttons and ‘shake’.

Maybe you could always embed code I didn’t notice it before. I am impressed by how the editor has improved over the last few years. The first few times I used micro:bits in class we switched away from our iPads and used PCs, I can see no good reason for doing so now.

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Read What do the PISA results tell us about Scottish education?
It is not unusual for immigrant children to perform better than a country’s majority population children in STEM subjects. Yet, the fact that they are able to perform so well in Scotland might offer some insights into why native Scottish children are not doing equally well. One of the reasons could be a lack of interest and motivation, indicating an important area for the policy development.

@MarkRPriestley , cutting through a pile of hype around Scotland’s PISA results. The success of immigrants ask a question, IMO, about the importance of extra-school influence on success in school.

The discussions around  PISA, success of cfe and the like are well above my blogger brain grade but fascinating and important.

Another interesting thread from @mrmcenaney

the improvement in reading, it is FAR more likely a consequence of what was happening in primary school 10 years ago, when the current PISA cohort started school, than 3 years ago, when they went to secondary.

It is really hard for humans and especially politicians it seems to look to the long term. We worry about possible bear attacks as opposed to glacier melting.