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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The new WordPress editor is now official. It comes with a new editor Gutenberg. I’ve tested Gutenberg on and off for a while, mostly worrying about iOS in particular iPads. That has improved steadily.

My concern is pupils using Glow Blogs will find the new editor more complicated.

I am somewhat relived that pasting from Apple Notes on an iPad works fine in the blocks editor, paragraphs generating new blocks. Adding images above or below a particular block seems a little footery but nothing pupils will not handle 1.

Now WordPress 5 is out I need to think about my own use. I don’t usually write in the web editor, preferring to either cut and paste from a text editor or post via micro.blog or xml-rpc. TextMate has a lovely blogging bundle, and I use drafts and shortcuts on iOS.

I’ve installed WordPress 5 on a couple of other sites, and had a quick play. Posting from TextMate, via xml-rpc put the content in a classic block if Gutenberg is enabled.

I’ve also enabled the classic editor plugin on these sites and this one. The ability to toggle back and forward between editors seems like a good idea, but on the sites I’ve tried it has mostly failed 2. This would be a good way to introduce the editor to Glow Blogs users, start with the classic editor, add in the ability to toggle to Gutenberg. I do worry that having two editors will lead to folk having problems or getting confused. I am not looking forward to updating the Glow Blogs help. This is probably a bit in the future as we should wait and see how Gutenberg is going on multi-sites before upgrading.

My other personal worry is that at the moment the indieweb post_kinds plugin is not compatible with Gutenberg. This is compounded by the fact I can’t update that plugin on this site at the moment. I am presuming that things will get shaken out and improve over the next year or two.

My plan is now to upgrade this blog to WP 5 but use the classic editor, waiting to see how the indieweb plugins evolve. I’ll continue writing in TextMate, drafts and the like while I keep half an eye on developments.

  1. I was pleasantly surprised watching a pupil happily collapsing meta-boxes to get her e-portfolio tags the other day. I had at some point shown the class how to expand them after they accidentally collapsed them, but not talked about it in any depth. I suspect pupils will adapt to new interfaces easier that I will. ↩
  2. I will test this a bit more and try to see if it is something I can report. Update version 1.2 of the classic Editor has fixed this for me.↩

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Aaron’s comments 📑 Making Change in Education – Champions are for Charlatans illuminate and extend Dave Cormier’s post:  Making change in education – champions are for charlatans

A good read for thinking about how Teaching and Learning changes.

I am not sure that splitting folk into champions, middle 60% and Laggards is quite accurate as folk may be enthusiastic about one thing and not another. It is useful to think about. We certainly need to think about the idea of superstar teachers and promoters of change.

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Quoted Computers have learned to make us jump through hoops | John Naughton by John Naughton (the Guardian)
I realised that what I had been doing was adding to a dataset for training the machine-learning software that guides self-driving cars – probably those designed and operated by Waymo, the autonomous vehicle project owned by Alphabet Inc (which also happens to own Google).
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Liked QAHS Digital Learn on Twitter (Twitter)
“Science Club we’re doing all things ‘Digital’ today and how these tools are used in Science. Great fun, we will do it all again next week too. Have a look at what we did today @Craig_R_Martin @FifeDLT @qahsinfo https://t.co/GvFb8C1EzB”

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Why we’re changing Flickr free accounts | Flickr Blog

Beginning January 8, 2019, Free accounts will be limited to 1,000 photos and videos. If you need unlimited storage, you’ll need to upgrade to Flickr Pro.

I got my mail from Flickr today explaining the changes. I’ve a pro account so it will not affect my photos at all.

I’ll be more interested in how it affects search. I often use Flickr photos to illustrate blog post, presentations and in my classroom.

I also encourage my pupils to use cc licensed images. It is hard for 8-11 year olds to attribute but the flick API allows me to help them with FlickrCC Stampr.

I wonder if the search will be less useful. There was some chat about keeping CC Images. I do hope so.

Update thanks to ronguest and jemostrom in the comments:

Photos that were Creative Commons licensed before our announcement are also safe. We won’t be deleting anything that was uploaded with a CC license before November 1, 2018. Even if you had more than 1,000 photos or videos with a CC license. However, if you do have more than 1,000 photos or videos uploaded, you’ll be unable to upload additional photos after January 8, 2019, unless you upgrade to a Pro account.

from: The Commons: The Past Is 100% Part of Our Future | Flickr Blog

That sound better:-)

Featured image for this post: flickr Scrabble by Dirk Dittmar used under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license. Stamped with the tool mentioned above.