I’ll be talking about Glow Blogs in a seminar at SLF on Thursday along with Andrea Hunter PT at Whinhill Primary School and some of her pupils. Andrea’s class blog at Diary of a Whinhill Pupil.
I’ll be at SLF both days spending some time on the Glow stand. If you are at SLF and have an interest in blogging, podcasting and the like please do have a chat. You can catch me on twitter @johnjohnston.
I’ll also be at TeachMeet SLF15 on Wednesday evening. We will try to stream that on Radio #EDUtalk.
Finally ios allows upload of files from more than the photo library. This is just the first mp3 I found in my Dropbox. It is a recording n Buchanian st. In Glasgow.
The more includes OneDrive for glow folk.
This opens up lost of possibilities for blogging and podcasting on the move.
I see a call for the banning of mobile technology in the classroom is popping up again:
Pupils could be banned from taking mobile phones and iPads into class under a major government crackdown on disruptive behaviour at school.
and
More than 90 per cent of teenagers have mobile phones, but a recent study by the London School of Economics claimed schools where they were banned saw test scores rise by an average of 6 per cent. There is currently no government policy about mobile phone use in England, as schools have to set restrictions themselves.
from: Mobile phones and iPads could be banned from classrooms – Telegraph
There is no doubt that in the classroom or ones personal life , mobiles can be a distraction. But this could easily be a teaching opportunity. We are all just scraping the surface of using these wee computers. Addressing attention, the social use of mobiles and the like could be an educational experience.
I am constantly being amazed at the power in my pocket. Last week I took a walk along the Kelvin to Milngavie. As I wandered along the phone records my track, analysed my speed, distance ect. I could grab notes, and take photos of interesting things.
If I’d needed to I could have made field recordings and I could have sent all this to a variety of places online for further manipulation. I’ve got a pile of data that can be analysed and shared.
Compared to only a few years ago this, and many other mobile applications, feel miraculous. The featured image photo, of a hoverfly (I think), is to me wonderful. Not because it is a great picture but because I can catch this amount of detail without being a photographer with the phone from my pocket.
Even this small subset of a mobiles features should surely make it worth the effort of how to minimise any negative effects of mobiles and their notifications. It is early days to be talking about bans.
Maybe advice like #tds75 You don’t need Twitter…. or #tds74 This is why I turn off notifications from The Daily Stillness (@livedtime) might be a start.
I’ve got my raspberry pi working as a webcam posting gifs every 9 minutes and stills every 5. Gif Cam.
The pi has been sitting around for a while acting as a web server with a broken tweetbot. It took very little effort to get it taking photos from our window and showing them on the web. Little more to grab a bunch and gif them (Gifsicle again). A better view might be more interesting.
I’ve not spent as much time as I’d like playing with the pi but the potential for play, learning and work seems large.
Saw this on DaringFireball.
DirectLinks – Canisbos is a Safari extension. Really useful for copying links from Google Search results. Update 6 Sep 2021: extension is gone, se DF for details, link now to archive. Ironic that the link goes to spam sites now.
Normally when you try and copy a link from a google search you get this sort of thing:
https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCwQFjABahUKEwjq9YnOtOPHAhXxS9sKHUQDB-k&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FFolktale&usg=AFQjCNHDEzwkM43l294OJ6AptxA7_Gg1pw&sig2=Lnf3ewVtFjbDOa7bl3SosA
As google wraps the link so that they can count clicks. Installing the DirectLinks extension means if I copy the same link I get:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folktale
Which is a lot more useful. A quick google finds ways of doing this in Firefox and chrome too. I’ve not tested those.
TeachMeet Scottish Learning Festival 2015 Breakout.
It is time for TeachMeet SLF 15.
WHEN: Wednesday, 23 September 2015 from 18:00 to 20:00 (BST)
WHERE: Citizen M Glasgow – 60 Renfrew St Glasgow, Lanarkshire G2 3BW GB
This time we are going back to out roots (sort of). The precursor to TeachMeet was the ScotEduBlogs meetup in May 2006 in the Jolly Judge in Edinburgh. The location was choose because it was in Edinburgh at the same time as the eLive conference, it was a pub and it had WiFi.
Over the years TeachMeets have diversified and spread. The locations have sometimes become a little more formal, with a focus on listen to one person at a time. We will still do that but the space at Citizen M will lend it self to breaking out into small fluid informal groups. I am not sure if I’d describe Citizen M as a pub, but it has a bar and the Wifi is the best I’ve experienced.
You can signup on the wiki to present or head over to eventbrite for a lurkers ticket.
Great post from Theo, touching on some many good things. I love the idea of extending the blimage to classes. I also love the idea of making something from the images. Echos of the bag of gold.
Source: Established 1658 — Medium
A manual PESOS
Source: Thimble by Mozilla – An online code editor for learners & educators.
Thimble gets a nice update. Here is the quickest webpage I could make: Kicking the Thimble.
You can now upload files, css, image, javascript ect and create & edit multiple files. Code completion seems a lot better to me too. It grumbles about Safari s oI switched to chrome which is recommended along with FireFox.
Obviously useful for learning to create webpages.
Earlier this month I read The Web Feels Fine to Me on the CogDogBlog, it contained lots of interesting links to pretty amazing websites. I am still mining the vein.
Along the way I discovered Making your own static web site isn’t nostalgia. It’s the future of the web. – Neocities Blog
For starters, nothing is more creative than HTML. Instead of a sad, tiny, highly constrained little square box to put your thoughts in (that ends up being sold to marketers) on ephemeral social networks that have been scientifically proven to make people miserable and depressed, you get the entire web page to put your thoughts into. Or your drawings. Or your music. Anything you can come up with using your imagination. When you make a web page, you’re not working for your social network’s stock brokers – you’re working for yourself.
Which fitted nicely along with various ideas I’ve been nodding along to recently.
Neocities says We provide free web hosting and tools that allow anyone to make a website. and Neocities will never sell your personal data or embed advertising on your site.
There is a browser based html/css/javascript editor and you can upload files via DragAndDrop.
You get 100mb of space.
It looks like they have education plans:
Neocities for Educators. A lot of teachers have been using Neocities to teach HTML to students. We think this is important, so we want to help them by providing special Neocities features for educators. We are also working on developing an integrated tutorial for those learning how to program HTML for the first time.
We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn HTML as a way to obtain technical literacy. It’s also the perfect first step to learning how to design and code software – one of the few careers that keeps growing fast in our information society.
from: Introducing the new Neocities – Neocities Blog
The site is as straightforward as can be, the html editor is pretty nice without being overpowering. It close tags and has nice colour schemes. Uploading files is simple. Perhaps it could be a useful resource for pupils learning a bit of html/CSS/JavaScript as a next step after using some of the online turtorials of the sort Ollie has been blogging recently.
I have kicked the tyres of the site a little producing the rather silly, but fun for me: GifDub (Which probably will not work on Internet Explorer, but seems ok on mobile. )
Last night I saw this tweet:
Hi @johnjohnston. Set up new WP class blog. Hoping to use translate function for an EAL ppl and family. See it mentioned but doesn’t appear?
— Karl Barrs (@KarlBarrs) August 20, 2015
The mention Karl was mentioning came from the Suffusion theme which has just been retired from Glow Blogs. Or developers had warned us that they though there would be too much technical debt in supporting it in the long term.
The Suffusion theme had given Glow Blogs many useful features, especially before the WordPress update at the start of this year. One of the features that folk found useful was a google translate widget. Ironically this was one of the things that started us seeing that the them would need a bit of TLC from the developers, they had to edit the theme to support serving blogs over https.
Currently you cannot add a google translation widget to a Glow Blog, you can add a link to an automatically translated page for one language, and visitors can swap languages to that page.
Here is a link to translate this blog to Dutch
You could link to a google translate page using a text widget on the side of your blog.
Here is how to do it: