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 been lucky, imo, to have been using an old 27 inch iMac as my computer in school since I started 8 years ago. Despite its age it has been a wonderful machine for me. Returning to my classroom last week I found it will no longer start up at all. No response to the power button. This was my Mac when I worked at the Education Computer Centre before being redeployed to the classroom.

Apart from my familiarity with Macs (going back to system 7) a Mac fits really well with a class all using iPads. The ease of sharing via Airdrop is probably the biggest advantage. It’s simplicity and the way it doesn’t depend on the cloud make it useable even if our internet connection is slow or down. I can quickly collect the pupils work via AirDrop and manipulate (print, combine, resize, assess, organise etc) it on my Mac.

I also prefer using the Apple productivity apps on an iPad but like creating & editing them even more on a Mac.

Large screen computers are rare in primary schools but I have been spoiled. We mostly use quite small laptops. I find these quite difficult to work on. If I use a trackpad for more than a few minutes I get pain in my shoulder and a couple of fingers go numb.

As we now only buy Windows machines in my L.A., I have access to a Windows laptop. However, my old fingers are Apple-trained. I am currently using a rather old MacBook Pro. I have the keyboard from the iMac plugged in, along with the mouse. I think I might just buy a cheap screen and add that as well. I can bring it home and make my Mac mini a dual-screen setup when the laptop follows the iMac.

Having used the MacBook for 4 days I realise how many think I’d added to the iMac (and have at home) that make my life easier. I am going to have to spend some time adjusting the MacBook to my habits. The ones l’ve particularly missed so far are:

  • FastScripts and the AppleScripts I run from it. These are pretty simple: resizing images, collections URLS from tabs to a list and the like.
  • HyperKey, that lets me run said scripts from the keyboard.
  • Various shell scripts, mostly for montage and combining images.
  • Alfred, as a launcher and clipboard manager.
  • I’d miss Rectangle if my screen was bigger.

All small things that I use without thinking and make my life simpler.

This week has certainly made me appreciate the technology I’ve been taking for granted. I also need to remind myself that in my time of teaching, I’ve gone from a couple of computers in a whole school without a network, to 1-2-1 iPads in my class today. Can’t complain!

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Replied to Replied to Behind a login on LinkedIn

For the last several years it has increasingly worried me that schools (governments & others institutions) used Twitter as their main publishing system. A system not designed for users but for advertisers and owners and more evidently recently their owner’s unsavoury ideas. We seem in some instances to be encouraging pupils to look at services they are legally too young for.

My use of Twitter dwindled and as far as possible I used it as a distribution system for content I own. I now hardly bother with that.

The decline of Instagram from a timeline based service to an advert filled algorithmic stream doesn’t fill me with confidence for threads. Similarly LinkedIn and other silos.

What all these systems bring is ease of use and this bring piles of pals. The onboarding to threads was almost invisible.

Unfortunately the ethically cleaner alternatives like mastodon or a combination of RSS & blogs have more friction. So far they have not had the huge influx of users that allows folk to build up a pile of pals. It would be useful, I think for someone to start an instance on mastodon for say Scot’s educators and then do some propaganda to get folk from twitter to move over.

I also really rate the micro.blog approach, which could be used as a model for educators.

I’ve PESOSed this post here.

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Bookmarked Degenerative AI in education by Ben Williamson.

But what if, instead of being generative of educational transformations, AI in education proves to be degenerative—deteriorating rather than improving classroom practices, educational relations and wider systems of schooling?

I’ve read this a couple of time, and probably need a couple more.

I guess, like other technologies that have entered the classroom, we are very much in the hands of the powerful. We get the technology we are given. Usually at a low cost, but perhaps at a high price?

As a side note, Jetpack now offers to change the tone of what I write with AI. Here is the humorous rewrite of the previous paragraph:

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Winding Chain - Triple Square Link with Wooden Spacers, 5½-inch Pitch, Wrought Iron, 1850s-1870s

I’ve not posted links for a while, these are some of the things I’ve found interesting in the last couple of weeks.

Technology

Education

Sounds

Nature

Featured image found with Openverse, attribution copied from the caption. Winding Chain – Triple Square Link with Wooden Spacers, 5½-inch Pitch, Wrought Iron, 1850s-1870s by Photographer: David Thompson is licensed under CC-BY 4.0

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A small example of the H5P Find Multiple Hotspots content type in Glow Blogs.

I was intrigued how these wee chicks survived given the number of dogs walked along this shore in addition to plenty of gulls & crows who I would expect to enjoy a plover chick dinner. Even the adults are quite hard to spot.

I am building a collection of H5P examples on Glow Blogs. I’ve also been using it to make some spelling crosswords, word-searches and cloze procedures for my class using the North Lanarkshire spelling word list.

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BBC Radio 4 – Word of Mouth, Chatbots 1

Like lots of other folk I’ve been reading plenty about Large Language Models, AI & Chatbots and playing with some of the toys.

I really liked Professor Bender’s approach and method. I also found this a very easy listen. My mind has tended to wander off when reading blogs post about AI. Very clear on the “not intelligent” and the risks associated with chatbots trained on large piles of language.

And specifically the things that they’re predicting is what would be a plausible next word given all the preceding words here and then again and then again and again.

…

And so that’s linguistically interesting that once you get to billions of words of text, there’s enough information in there just in the distribution of words to stick with things that are both grammatical and seemingly coherent.

…

So that’s a cool observation and it’s dangerous because we tend to react to grammatical, fluent, coherent, seeming text as authoritative and reliable and valuable.

…

So instead of talking about automatic speech recognition, I prefer to talk about automatic transcription because that describes what we’re using it for and doesn’t attribute any cognition to the system that is doing the task for us.2

 

  1. I subscribe to the RSS feed of this BBC radio program as a podcast, pity you can’t find the feed on the webpage. ↩
  2. Ironically I used Aiko to get the text of the podcast for the quotes: “transcription is powered by OpenAI’s Whisper model running locally on your device” ↩

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Robin at dawn. Dither image. It was poor anyhow due to light.

The above is a short selection of a few moments of the stream I broadcast this morning, 10 minutes in total. The segments are each separated by 1 seconds of generated silence. The Whole thing is on the Stream Page.  There is a fox barking near the start and a pigeon claps its wings over head near the end.

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