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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Here are some of the things I’ve tagged classroom over the summer holidays.

  • A garden alive with art: all-natural insect sculptures – in pictures I think my class might like this as it combines outdoors, insects and art. I suspect it is trickier than it looks to get these sorts of results.

    Inspired by the art of ikebana – a traditional style of Japanese flower arranging – Montreal-based artist Raku Inoue hand-crafts bugs using materials from his garden. He transforms his garden waste, including sticks, seeds and petals, to create his Natura Insects series. “I think about the main shape of the insect,” he says, “and try to find something to satisfy that. It’s very much like a puzzle.” As the year progresses, his creative options change. “I choose the materials according to what nature offers during that time. All four seasons offer many different materials to play with.” The series started as a morning routine over coffee to sharpen his thoughts for the day. “It was never meant to be a complex process, but rather an easygoing, morning mind-stretching exercise.”

  • Problem Solving: Grade 4 Mathematics There looks like there is a lot of resources on this site.
  • Control Alt Achieve: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

    To prove this I have used Google Sheets to create a “Random Writing Prompt Generator” that randomly pulls from a list of about 2,000 adjectives and 1,000 nouns to create over 2 million unique prompts. See below to get your own copy of the Sheet, learn how it works, and get more ideas on how to help your students write poems, stories, or other creations.

  • Create & Innovate with Keynote Pile of resources for keynote in classroom, links, embeded videos and some templates. (All About Me, Choose Your Own Adventure, Coding with Keynote, Eclipse Animations, Green Screen, Holograms, Illuminated Text (Poetry in Motion), Infographics, Invisible Buttons, Learning Journals, Prototype, Quiz Shows, Selfie Bingo & Shape Stories. )
  • The Literacy Calendar 2018-19 – Literacy with Miss P The following table provides a map of the academic year with a range of key calendar events. It includes national days or weeks and a whole host of school competitions and events. I’ve also added some key children’s literature award dates as it’s always good to keep an eye out for new and exciting quality texts.
  • ADE Worldwide Institute 2018: 5 Star Points From The Lone Star State. | Next Generation Learning; Today… As far as Pages is concerned, it too has brilliant functionality with the Apple Pencil, effectively becoming a powerful sketching tool as well. The workflow means you can easily create interactive EPUB books that can be viewed in iBooks. When starting a document, scroll down to find the Books template. Once selected, you can add text, photos, image galleries, videos, shapes, tables, charts and your own drawings to your document. On iOS you can also record audio directly to your document. This effectively means we will no longer need to spend £5 on purchasing the Book Creator App.
  • Lesson Plans – The Art of Ed
  • Bio Poem template PDF. I’ve used and amended this many times, unfortunately I’ll not be able to this year as for some of my pupils this is the third year in my class!

    A Bio Poem is all about you. It is a way for you to introduce yourself to others. Take some time to think about yourself – your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Then, use the template and example below to write your own Bio Poem.

  • Mr. Fahey’s Tech: UPDATED!!! 13 Ways to Enhance Math Lessons with Flipgrid

Featured image: my own, I spent a fair bit of the summer trying to get close to butterflies.

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Another experimental microcast. I recorded this on a walk last week using the iPhone audio memos app. Just kept a memo open and recorded fragments on the go. Unfortunately at some point I hit done and when I added more, without looking, I recorded over the start.

On editing in ferrite the app crashed everytime. So I switched to Hokusai 2 cut the start pasted it to the end and then levelled in Auphonic. Finally back in Ferrite I added the intro (recorded in Ferrite and run through Auphonic).

This if far too complicated. I also need a dead cat from the phone to cut down on wind noise.

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As part of my summer holiday fun with WordPress I though I might create a ‘proper’ RSS feed for my microcast.

There are quite a few podcast plugins that would do the job but I though it might be interesting to try a bit of DIY.

Back when I started a class podcast at Radio Sandaig I used to create the RSS feed by hand with a text editor and a fair bit of copy and paste. Over at Edutalk we use feedburner to massage the feed for iTunes.

I used information from How to Roll Your Own Simple WordPress Podcast Plugin | CSS-Tricks to get me started with the template.

I copied the feed-rss2.php file from the wp-includes folder to my child theme folder renaming it feed-microcast.php

wp-content/themes/sempress-child/feed-microcast.php

I adjusted the query to get the posts from my microcast category. I also hard coded the title, link, image and a few other things to simplify the process a little.

I then used the template from CSS-Tricks as a guide to adding the various podcast tags to my template.

This ended up with a pretty broken feed, mostly due to my lack of care, but I fixed it up later I got it linked up.

I didn’t want to use the custom post type approach used in the article because that would involve editing all the old posts or converting them to the new type somehow.

My first idea was to create a feed template and switch to that when the RSS feed for my microcast category was called for.

After failing to get the template to switch for the standard category feed, /category/microcast/feed I ended up with a custom feed at /feed/microcast.

and I add

add_action('init', 'customRSS');
function customRSS(){
        add_feed('microcast', 'customRSSFunc');
}

function customRSSFunc(){
        get_template_part('feed', 'microcast');
}

to my functions.php file.

I then spent a bit of time using the W3C feed validation service until I fixed the feed up to valadate.

I’ve still got to get a link to the feed into the microcast category page head tag and I hope to do that as soon as I’ve gone a bit of research. For now I’ve a link in the sidebar.

Here is the template: WordPress RSS feed template for my microcast

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You can’t do without an RSS reader, for the last few years I’ve liked Inoreader.

Surge is a useful tool to play about with making webpages. It is aimed at developers but I think it is handy for dabblers too. Works for static sites. A lot of the documentation is for things beyond my ken (Grunt, Gulp and other things I do not recognise). You can however build la local webpage and easily push it online. Here is a very silly one: Sounds Bad!.

The Daily Stillness | daily small exercises to help you find stillness: a bit like the daily create on #DS106 or this #dailyponderance bu for thinking about your relationship to technology and life.

FlickrCC Stampr This is one I built myself for my primary pupils. The idea was to make it really simple for young children to attribute but ‘stamping’ the attribution onto the image.

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Bookmarked Flippity – heck this could be useful! by Alan Stewart (Alan Stewart's AT Blog)
In its own words flippity allows you to: Easily turn a Google™ Spreadsheet into a Set of Online Flashcards and Other Cool Stuffv

I saw this on Alan Stewart’s blog. It looks really useful. I did something similar when I made a Fridge for poetry. This allows you to customise the images & word list via a google spreadsheet. Not as professional looking as Flippity…

Could be useful for Glow users given Glow now gives access to Google for some LAs (Not mine Alas).

I wonder if something similar could be done with Excel in O365? It doesn’t appear to be as easy to connect from webpages as a google sheet?

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A bit over a week ago I got a tweet from Athole

The premise is simple enough, for 7 days you take a B&W image, tweet it and ask someone else to join in.

I did:

Day 7 is the featured image of this post.

What is interesting about this project is that there is no hashtag. You get mentions from the folk you invite, if they take the invite up and perhaps from some of their invitees.

An enjoyable experience, I though a bit about photography (or at least my phone snapping) and enjoyed seeing other folks images. It felt a little more relaxed than hashtag type collaborations. More meandering perhaps…

Thanks to Athole and the folk who I pestered to join in.