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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Strangely I saw this on Ewan’s instagram, it led me to a google form which looks like it is gathering reports of TeachMeet to a book that will be given away on a Creative Commons licence, with donations to a children’s charity encouraged.

How has TeachMeet changed your teaching or learning? What is the one memorable talk or conversation you had? What is the most profound change you’ve seen in your classroom? Tell us here, and be part of the TeachMeet 10th Birthday book!

from: TeachMeet’s 10! Tell your story

The main question is

How did TeachMeet make an impact in your world?

Tell your story. Be passionate. Who influenced you? Who did you meet? What was the result in your learning or teaching further down the road?

About 10 years ago I went to The ScotEdubBlogger Meetup that kicked off the TeachMeet movement. It has have a pretty big effect on my learning and life.

When TeachMeet started it seemed like something completely different and it chimed with ideas that I was starting to think about then and have been thinking about ever since.

To me TeachMeet had some interesting components. These might not be the same for other people and they are certainly out of step with the way that some TeachMeets have developed.

    1. TeachMeets were a reaction against conference sessions and keynotes where a Guru talked through a slide deck for an hour.
    2. The idea was that everyone who turned up was willing to talk if their name came out of the picker, for 7 or 2 minutes.
    3. There were no keynoters and no one came first or was guaranteed a spot.
    4. There was no PowerPoint, this is an oft broken rule, the spirit, IMO, is that you don’t read your way through some sets of slides.
    5. If you were not interested in the current speaker you were free to have a chat.
    6. The atmosphere was relaxed, a few drinks and nibbles.

Lead by Ewan, these ideas were developed, influenced by BarCamp.

The first few events, felt incredibly exciting. We talked like maniacs, posted photos, wrote blogs posts. There was a fairly strong tech bias, but the mantra ‘It is the teach not the tech’ was chanted.

The change it made in my classroom was not so much the ideas I gathered from others but the the idea the teachers could make decisions about how they did things and gave me confidence to follow my own ideas.

I felt they echoed the way blogging seemed to be developing. People expressing their own views, organising themselves from the bottom up, democratic, without hierarchy. There were influences from the OpenSource movement and the tech world too. Blogs posts, flickr photos links in delicious were tagged and could be aggregated.

For me it is mixed with ideas of sharing, creative commons, openness and fun. It fitted with my growing interest in Open technologies and OER.

If I was to condense what I have got from TeachMeet it would boil down to the idea of doing it for ourselves1, owning our own spaces and sharing freely.

On the back of this trip down memory lane comes the idea of rebootingTeachMeet in Scotland: TeachMeetScot from Fearghal Kelly. There is a lot of interest and interesting comments on that post and in a response by Robert: Teachmeet+ | Learning Stuff About Stuff.

I think TeachMeet is worth going on with. Not necessarily for immediate impact on the practice of the attendees but as Robert says:

Now maybe the point of Teachmeet is to embed the good practices in the classroom of the presenters themselves. This seems more likely. I think that might apply to me. If so, we should return to the principle that Teachmeets are for presenting, not for listening.

This speaks to the second bullet above. It also hints that we need to get away from old hands organising or running the meetings. TeachMeets were in part a reaction and need to continue to be just that.

In a follow up post Fearghal explains that he can’t organise TeachMeets himself. Perhaps those of use who have and could should step back a bit. Old hands could do the boring stuff 2, but hand over to a new set of not only presenters but the chairperson’s role too.

Maybe we could suggest that all of the audience were ready with at least a 2 minute presentation or idea, no slides or screen at all. I’d like that, but perhaps that should not be the point…

1. I alway hear Teachers Are Doin’ It for Themselves Eurythmics – Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves – YouTube ↩2. Set up google forms, sort out online stuff, source a projector… ↩

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twitter-lists-resized

Another interesting idea from Alan. I read his post: Measurement or [indirect] Indicators of Reputation? A Twitter List / Docker / iPython Notebook Journey and then Amy’s List Lurking, As Inspired by Alan Levine.

The idea is that you can find out something about a person/yourself by the twitter lists they are listed in.

Alan went down a nice rabbit hole involving Docker & iPython. This seemed as if it might be a mite tricky. I think I’ve messed up my mac’s python setup by trying to get iPython Notebooks working before. Alan’s approach is a lot more sensible, I hope to re-visit it later. In the meantime I though I would try out something a little simpler. This approach is simple sorting and manipulating a text files. Mostly with, in my case, TextMate’s sorting and a bit of bash in the terminal.

So:

  1. I went to the list on twitter and copied all of the text on the page.
  2. Pasted that into a text document
  3. Manually cleaned up the bits above and below the list (a couple of selections and backspace)This produced a list that repeated the following pattern:
    • Name of list by Name of lister
    • Subtitle/description of list, sometime not there
    • Number of Members
  4. I sorted the list. This grouped all of the lines with number Members together, a couple of lists that started with … or a number above.
  5. Select all the member lines and delete
  6. there were a lot of lines Visit http://twibes.com/education/twitter-list to join the top education Twitter people as a description so easy to delete them too.
  7. I saved this file as a file list1.txt
  8. What I was looking for was the lines that were lists names not descriptions, and I wanted the lists rather than the names of the people who made the lists. So I made the lists into two columns by replacing by with a TAB and saved the file.
  9. We then sort the list by the second column using the terminal sort -k 2 -t $'\t' list1.txt > list2.txt 1 As the second column is empty those lines float to the top and can easily be deleted.
  10. Next we cut the first column out which gives me a list of the list names: cut -f 1 list2.txt | sort > list3.txt

So I now have a list of the the twitter lists I am a member of. I can use that in wordle.net to get a word cloud. I made a few, removing the most popular words to see the others in more relief. I’ve tied them together in a gif at the top of this post.

Amy’s approach was to look for interesting list name, here are some of my favourites (I’ve added descriptions when they are there):

  • awesome rasbperrypi peopl
  • audiophiles
  • Botmakers: Blessed are the #botALLIES
  • Digital cool cats: Digital humanities/learning tech/cool stuff peeps
  • People I met through DS106
  • not to be messed with
  • Coolest UK Podcasters
  • Very funky Ed Blogs

Of course these are not the most numerically but they are, to me, the most flattering;-)

On this 10th birthday of twitter you might enjoy a quick browse through the name of the lists you are a member of.

Update
Sleeping on this post I’ve had a few more thought.

Of course after the step where I replaced the word by with a tab I could have pasted the text into excell or numbers and taken it from there rather than using the commandline.

I woke up this morning thinking about Alan’s post and using docker to run iPython notebooks and had a mini revelation. I’ve often ran into trouble and messed up, at least short term, my computer. Trying things that I don’t really understand. I remember one instance where I got into a right mess with iPython by blindly installing.

Running things in a virtual machine would have a great advantage here. Likewise I’ve had things break after a system update. I think, going forward, when doing things above my pay grade I’ll change my approach a bit. I am now wondering why I was trying to get the iPython thing running in the first place.

Overall I’d have learnt a bit more by following Alan’s recipe directly. There is also the json think he turned away from, could be an interesting rabbit hole…

1. sort -k 2 -t $'\t' list1.txt > list2.txt THis sorts by the second column, k, key and uses a tab, $’\t’ to separate the columns ↩

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Radio Edutalk 09-03-2016 #OEPSforum4

I was along at the OEPScotland, Opening Educational Practices in Scotland Forum 4 this week representing Radio #EDUtalk. Not to broadcast or record but to show our poster 1

It was a great meeting, I did broadcast and posted some comments on EDUtalk along with some links after the event..

The keynote by Josie Fraser was filmed and I hope that it will be put up somewhere as it was great.

The attendees were mostly from Higher Education, but I think the ideas behind openness are more than relevant to schools and other learning spaces. Josie’s work is in the school sector and would be a great model to follow: Open Education for Schools – Policy & Practice.

I’ve put some good links on the Radio Edutalk 09-03-2016 #OEPSforum4 post.

  1. Unfortunatly there is a wee typo on my email address. ↩

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Return of the amazing Glo.li

 

From Charlie Love. A while back I posted here about shortening Glow O365 links to avoid the double authentication. Charlie has rebooted his glow.li link shortener and added in this feature in a much neater way. The form recognises a link to Glow O365 automatically and sorts you out with a link to take you in via RM Unify.

Charlie’s http://www.glo.li is beautiful, and has the advantage of nice branding with a url to remind you it is a glow link.

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I am really excited about this one.
Radio #EDUtalk will be at #oer16

OER16: Open Culture
19th & 20th April 2016, University of Edinburgh, UK
The 7th Open Educational Resources Conference, OER16: Open Culture, will be held on the 19th-20th April 2016 at the University of Edinburgh.

OER16 will focus on:

  •    The strategic advantage of open and creating a culture of openness.
  •    Converging and competing cultures of open knowledge, open source, open content, open practice, open data and open access.
  •    Hacking, making and sharing.
  •    The reputational challenges of openwashing.
  •    Openness and public engagement.
  •    Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education.

from: OER16

I am not sure what we will be broadcasting but I hope it might include conversations between various speakers and attendees.

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Last week I spent some time with a chromebook. It was the cheapest one on the Scottish procurement. I was surprised how responsive it was, quick to start up, reasonable trackpad and OK keyboard.

It seemed to be that if you were mostly using the web or if your needs were met by web browser applications that it would do quite a lot. I was reminded of Clarence Fisher talking about using a raspberry pi and finding it could meet a lot of his needs.

Personally I’ll stick to my MacBook for as long as I can afford to. I’ve got a lot of muscle memory, customisation and spent a fair bit on applications over the years. Along with the long life of Apple computers I don’t think I pay too much for what I get. I was interested in exploring how to do some things with a chromebook and the raspberry pi connection got me googling.

It seems you can connect to a raspberry pi in the same way I do from Mac and iOS devices, via ssh.

According to various sites and posts I found there is a built in terminal in the chrome browser that supports ssh.

So I hit control-alt-t to open the wheel and typed in ssh username@pi.johnj.info
At that point I got a message saying that the built in tool was no longer there and I needed to install an app. This I did.
secure she'll app

I’ve now got the secure shell app. This lets me easily connect to and work/play on the pi in the same way I already do from Mac or iOS.
top on the pi

For a dabbler like myself this is a pretty nice setup. Especially at less than £200.

I am just kicking tyres on the pi without any depth of knowledge but it already is running:

Quite a lot for such a wee box and there are tons of other things I could add given a bit of reading.

I think this points to the possibilitys of two small cheap devices adding value to each other and opening up some possibilities.

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The audio on this post was recorded and uploaded with the Workflow.app on my phone. The images were too. The posts was written in drafts and posted from there with a Workflow action.

Yesterday’s post was just about using workflow.app to post to a blog in a way that other tools can do. The method might suit some people’s needs better than using the WordPress app or the browser. It could be altered and improved too. But essentially it is just another way of doing something. I think this next step is a much bigger deal.

Workflow has actions that allow you to record audio or take video. It also has an encode media action.

record-encode-screenshot

This looked promising. I have now got a workflow that will record audio, encode to MP3 and upload to my blog.

I will end up with the link to the MP3 on the clipboard ready to paste into a post.

Getting the url to the MP3 took me a while to figure out. The action returns the url to the attachment page. I had to uses a few more actions to get the content of that page and then get the url to the MP3 with a regular expression. I don’t know much about regEx and less about the flavour used by Worpflow.app. I got there in the end.

workflow-regEx

A couple of OSs ago this seemed impossible on iOS. Now you can save an MP3 created with one of the myriad of audio apps to Dropbox, iCloud, one drive ect and upload through mobile safari.

I like to think this is a bit better. It is certainly a wee bit quicker if you do not need to edit the audio.

There were always apps that would record and publish audio to the Internet. What I like about this method is it goes along with the idea of owning your own data, posting to your own domain and having a little more control.

I am now wondering if it would be worthwhile seeing if you can trigger workflows from a draft.app custom script. This post on the drafts blog: Drafts 4.1.2 – Workflow Integration | Agile Tortoise makes it look as if that would be possible. This would turn the drafts app into a WordPress editor. One could upload images and audio directly from drafts, perhaps inserting the image or audio code at the insertion point.

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Posting to WordPresss is pretty simple on the go. Recent versions of WordPress have a fairly good performance on Mobile Safari. the WordPress app performs a little better the body field is less ‘jumpy’ and uploading photos a little simpler.

There are a few other blogging apps but I’ve not stuck with any.

I tend to write posts in drafts as there is even less chrome and more space to type. It also has some clever shortcuts, helps with markdown and can do cleaver stuff with text and scripts.

A while back I noticed that the new version of Workflow had actions for posting to WordPress. I made some quick tests sand it seemed to do the trick.

Today I started thinking about it again. Workflow allows you to make posts, pages and media. When I tried uploading media I was disappointed that uploading an image returns the url to the attachment webpage rather than the attachment itself.

I’ve tried to extract the url form the page but the best I have is to extract all of the urls on the page and present this as a list to choose from. This is copied to the clipboard.

image upload

So I have an workflow that is an action extension. This allow me to pick a photo then run the workflow. It is presented as a document picker in other apps, for example pixelmator. When this workflow runs it resizes the image and uploads it to my blog. It then grabs the attachment page and pulls a list of links out of that. I can pick a link to copy to the clipboard.

Making a post

The next workflow I have is one for making a post. This runs from drafts.
It first set a variable to the draft. Then it shows the photo library. When a phot is picked it uploads the photo to the blog. As in the first script it downloads the attachment page, extracts the urls and let’s me pick one. This time the one picked is put in another variable.

The workflow then get the first variable, and posts it to the blog as a draft. It asks for a title and used the url to the uploaded image as the posts featured image.

It also asks for tags when it runs.

The featured image for this post is a couple of screenshots taken on my phone. They were stitched together with workflow and the result edited a bit in snapseed.

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I’ve had a lot interesting audio interactions this week.

A couple of weeks ago I mention Anchor and I’ve continued to play with that. Simon Thomson (@digisim) invited me to participate in a storytelling idea, folk just take turns to record the next short segment. It is only Simon and me at the moment but I am sure he would be happy to hear from others:

On Wednesday evening Joe Dale was my guest on Edutalk. Joe discussed iOS audio apps. He also provided a marvellous set of links for the show notes: Radio Edutalk 17-02-2016 Joe Dale iOS Audio Apps.

Joe also tweeted a link to Tabletop Audio – Ambiences and Music for Tabletop Role Playing Games which has a collection of 90 atmospheric sounds that you can play or download. Each is 10 minutes long. You can play the audio live or download it to your computer.

The sounds are available under a Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International — CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. The sounds could also be used to provide atmosphere in the classroom, perhaps during a writing task.

Back on the anchor beat I tried a few times to record a trafficjam anchor, I’ve not quite managed to make them loud enough yet or avoid running over but I did post this weeks review after I parked.

There are a lot of nice things about Anchor and it will be interesting to see where it goes. I think it is going to be one of those apps where you need pals on the same platform, at the moment the twitter search brings back very few folk for me. Hopefully this will grow, the anchor folk are intending to add an android app into the mix.