Category Archives: wwwd

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Liked: Scratch is a big deal | Bryan Braun – Frontend Developer

Interesting take on Scratch by a Developer & parent.

This recent growth has caused Scratch to break into the Tiobe index’s top 20 most popular programming languages. At the time of this post (July 2022) it ranks 21st, above Typescript, Rust, Julia, and other important languages. The Tiobe index is imperfect but there’s clearly something happening here.

Bryan points to some

It’s pretty impressive how ambitious the projects get. Scratchers often build copycats of “real” games like Cut the Rope, Super Mario Bros, and Terraria. Features like cloud variables allow them to make online multiplayer games, like Taco Burp (popular in my house)

This is quite a different degree of scratching than I’ve seen in my and other classroom recently.

The REST APIs enable third-party tooling like Turbowarp—a parallel site that can run Scratch projects 20x faster.

 

A bit clicking leads to Paper Minecraft v11.6 (Minecraft 2D) on Scratch!

A lot of food for thought, I never spend much time with scratch beyond preparing and experimenting with the most basic of things. I am not sure it is a rabbit hope I want to peer down for long. I think the simple types of things we do in class are enough for most of the pupils (along with micro:bits, lego and other coding). The advanced projects might be useful to point some of the more confident pupils at.

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Replied to The startupification of education (werd.io)
But not everything has to be scalable; not everything has to be venture scale. There are a lot of public services, technologies in the public interest, and fully-profitable businesses that benefit by not trying to reach scale. Relationships are the building blocks of society; eradicating those in favor of analytics, in education of all places, is counter-productive, to put it charitably.

This is a wonderful post Ben, thanks you.  It speaks, to me as a primary teacher, to more than just EdTech and startUps. The big internet beasts have some claws in education and seem to be working towards what you call the  rat-maze simulation of intimacy. Governments seem bent on datafication.

Technology can be part of informal & formal personal relationships. The technology I find interesting is messy engaging and has not much to do with scalability & market share.

In my tiny world, I hope technology helps inclusion, engagement, diversification of approaches and fun. The presentation & recording of learning in a useful way by learner that is still individual, not auto analysable and open to conversation.

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Reposted https://twitter.com/GlowScot/status/1531893505081192449 by Glow Scot (Twitter)

Are you looking for an introduction to Glow WordPress Blogs? In this webinar @DigiLearnScot are joined by Breadalbane Academy with lots of tips on how to access and use Glow Blogs and how they are being used in the classroom! https://ow.ly/5W4550Jisbv

Guide to getting started with #GlowBlogs. Input from
@KiwiGrant21 who’s marvellous pupil poetry blog, Breadalbane Academy P7 Poetry Blog is a brilliant example with poem ideas that are just great, I’ve borrowed a few:-)

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I occasionally use Word Cloud generators for school use, for example a header on a blog post. Each time I just search and try a couple until I find one that is free, doesn’t need a sign-up and does what I want.

I’ve also occasionally used iPad apps, but never found one I like enough to remember.

This week I needed one again but given I has 30 minutes free I searched for commandline wordclouds instead. This took me to amueller/word_cloud: A little word cloud generator in Python.

A bit of copy pasting in the terminal got this installed. I can now make lists of words in a text file and quickly create a word cloud with something like this:

wordcloud_cli --text spelling-list-1.txt --imagefile spelling-list-1.png --width 800 --height 400 --colormap tab20

It only take a few seconds. I could batch process a pile of lists all at once.

The app has a lot of features, colour schemes, size variations, fonts and the like and is beautifully documented: Command Line Interface — wordcloud 1.8.1 documentation.

The featured image uses text from Get Drunk! a handy test text.

wordcloud_cli --text get\ drunk.txt --imagefile getdrunk-3.png --width 800 --height 400 --colormap tab20 --fontfile /Library/Fonts/GiddyupStd.otf

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The music lives on – Apple

iPod touch will be available while supplies last

I feel quite sad about this. I don’t think the iPod every got the traction it deserved in the classroom.

Back in the late 2000s I had a click wheel iPod in my class. It was a great device for recording audio on the move. Despite the low quality of recording by class found it really easy to use compared with other recorders at the time.

In 2010 I was involved in supporting a class using 1–2–1 iPod touches, and blogged a fair bit about it I though. They had a great deal of potential for the primary classroom. The introduction of the iPad put paid to that. I still think that a pocketable device might have been useful in school. Reviewing these old posts I found quite a few records of efforts to develop ideas for using webpages for teaching and learning with iPods. I had a bit of fun with that.

In my fantasy classroom pupils would be equipped with iPod touches and MacBooks, maybe the lovely 11 inch Air.

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Over the last few years I’ve had quite a bit of fun with micro:bits. Given I’ve been using the same ones all that time they were pretty good value. It is great to see them getting a bit more traction in Scottish schools.

We are to get some more free ones: Scottish schools to receive 20 micro:bits. This will be great. I’ve got access to plenty but the new ones have some nice new features. Built-in microphone, speaker, capacitive touch sensor, and power save button. The speaker will be particularly welcome, avoiding a bit of footering . The power button too as I’ve found that detaching the battery is quite tricky for small fingers. I hope they arrive soon.

There are also a lot more support events & materials for classes appearing.

19 May 11 – 11:45 Code Along with micro:bit – Relaxation & Mindful Breathing looks fun, but clashes with our sports day. My class did participate in a couple of similar scratch events via Teams. Although these were not anything I could not have covered myself. I did find the pupils were extra engaged with a virtual teacher and peers.

You don’t even need micro:bits to take part,

Micro:bit not required as you can still take part using the MakeCode simulator.

Which until this week I would have though was missing the point. The other day I was re-introducing some of my class to micro:bits. They had made simple rock, paper, scissors shakers. We were discussing the problem of knowing, for sure, if the shake had worked. Two similar results could be due to random selection or by nothing happening. While the pupils were playing with solutions to this one explained he was not going to flash the micro:bit every time. He preferred the simulator! This surprised me, as I think the device is a big draw for most pupils.

The other week New support for teachers launched today | micro:bit. I’ve already found the examples and projects on makecode.microbit.org very useful. I am looking forward to getting to try the ones for the new micro:bits.

In class we have been using the iOS micro:bit app rather than the web. This solves the issue of flashing the micro:bits via usb by using Bluetooth and works really well. We did a bit of work on our arcade devices this session. That meant pupils using the web downloading hex files on their iPads, air dropping to a MacBook and then transferring to the devices. Bluetooth avoids the “one MacBook” bottleneck.

The other bit of micro:bit information I have is that Glow Blogs now supports the embedding of the micro:bit simulator. This enables pupils to share their creations and keep a record of their achievements. I’ve just updated the microbit instructions for Glow Blogs. I hope to see some examples in the wild soon.

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Well I am quite excited. There is a new plugin in Glow Blogs, H5P. This is quite different from anything else in blogs.

H5P is a system for creating interactive HTML5 content. It can work inside several types of publishing platforms including WordPress.

The range of content types that you can create with H5P is pretty wide. Some are ways of presenting material, accordions, image galleries. Others are learning activities, quizzes, multi-choice questions, word searches and crosswords. More sophisticated types include interactive video. Videos can be paused by viewers to respond to questions and quizzes and 360 tours. Responses to quizzes, cloze procedures etc are gathered from logged on users.

You can combine these content types , or display them on a blog in different ways.

I’ve spent a bit of time making some simple examples for Glow Blogs which has allowed me to start to think about how best to use these.

I’ve also started to build up a small bank of resources for spelling for my class: igh example. So far I am only scratching the surface.

I’ve always enjoyed making online resources for my classes to use. but these can take a lot of time and can be difficult to make presentable or present. The H5P plug-in solves many of these problems and are made “inside” the blog.
Having them on a blog allows resources to be quite easily organised. The Display Posts plug-in or using the make theme helps. Post listing in Gutenberg will be useful too.

Here are a couple of examples embedded from Glow Blogs.

A 360 tour:

and a fill in the missing words exercise.

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In Contra Chrome, Leah carefully charts this road and its terrain in a funny and easily accessible way. In webcomic form, she documents how over the last decade, Google’s browser has become a threat to user privacy and the democratic process itself.

Contra Chrome is a pretty amazing pice of work from any angle.

The fair use of Scott McCloud‘s Google-commissioned Chrome comic from 2008 is a nice touch.