Kind: Articles

traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body

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Alan ask:

Interviewing Your Domain

And suppies some questions, just like blogs way back when!

What is your domain name and what is the story, meaning behind your choice of that as a name?

johnjohnston.info ’cause .com and .co.uk and others were not available. I waited too long to get my name.

What was your understanding, experience with domains before you got one? Where were you publishing online before having one of your own?

This takes me down memory lane.

I started publishing on the web on aol. At http://members.aol.com/weefishes, (Internet archive from 1998), I was trying to share and sell some HyperCard stacks and applications. My business was called LittleFish. This lead to my first domain http://littlefishsw.co.uk I guess I wanted to have a more professional URL and more control over the content.

I took the same route with my school website, http://members.aol.com/sandaig (Archive 2001), then http://sandaigprimary.co.uk, (archive for 2003)

I started this blog on the Sandaig domain in 2005 (2007 snapshot on the Archive).

At that point I though of domains are more memorable URLs that would allow me a wee bit more freedom than AOL hosting.

I had or was involved in other domains, some of which still are in use. One of my favourite was opensourcecpd.org.uk which was a plan to follow open source principals for CPD. It never took off but I love the idea.

What was a compelling feature, reason, motivation for you to get and use a domain? When you started what did you think you would put there?

When I left Sandaig I wanted to move my blog away from the school site, so I sorted out a site and this domain. I migrated all the content for the old blog and eventually changed platforms to WordPress. I consider the blog, as continuous despite the domain and platform changes.

The blog sits at /blog I wanted the site to be more than a blog, it is full of different simple and messy web experiments and tests.

What kinds of sites have you set up one your domain since then? How are you using them? Please share URLs

I’ve no subdomain on this domain, but lots of folders. My favourites include my ds106 blog at /106, Flickr CC Stamper at /fcc and my /walks.

I do have another domain johnj.info which has a few sub domains that point to a far number of sites:

What helped you or would have helped you more when you started using your domain? What do you still struggle with?

My domains grew in a messy and organic way. Previous choices affect future ones. Of course I’d like everything neat and tidy but…

I don’t handle or control the dns for this site. Hence the johnj.info domain and sub domains. My host does this. I stick with him because he is great and has indulged me a lot. Some other sites I host elsewhere for price and cause I like Jim too.

What kind of future plans to you have for your domain?

I am exploring the indieweb more, hopefully I’ll keep that going.

What would you say to other educators about the value, reason why to have a domain of your own? What will it take them to get going with their own domain?

I like the idea of my own space more than a domain. I like futzing. It is important, to me, to have one place. Sites in silos, or aol, or tilde spaces are fine playgrounds.but services go away. The domain is just an address pointing to my messy kingdom where I can do what I want, if I can.

I find great value in having my blog go back for years. I search it often. If I’d trusted a silo my content might have vanished by now.

Ideally everyone would get a domain automatically. Obviously this would make for a lot of domains.

featured image created with AppleScript & Gifsicle ‎autocomplete-gifs

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I got a request from a teacher who wanted to download a years worth of images from a Glow Blog (for end of year slideshow).

Although there are plugins that can do this these are not available on Glow Blogs. I was stumped apart from going through the site and downloading them 1 by 1. But after a wee bit of thinking I though I’d try using the REST API via AppleScript.

The REST API will list in JSON format the media:

http://johnjohnston.info/blog/wp-json/wp/v2/media/

Look at that in FireFox for a pretty view.

JSON Helper is

an agent (or scriptable background application) which allows you to do useful things with JSON directly from AppleScript.

So I can grab the list of media from a site in JSON format use appleScript to download all the files.

The script I wrote is not great, you can’t download from a particular year, but a quick look at the JSON will help in working out how many files to download.

I am sure there are more efficient ways to do this and I’ve only tested on a couple of site, but it seems to do the trick and might be useful again sometime.

Continue for the script:

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The ScotEduBlogs site which aggregates posts from Scottish Educational bloggers mostly hums along by itself.

Every so often I get an email to add a blog, or one for someone ignoring the, “Please do not use this form if you want us to review a product or you want to post here, we will not do so or reply”. notice.

Recently something went wrong with the form and I missed a couple which I’ve now rectified.

This reminds me to post about SEB here. I think it is a valuable resource, gathering blogs posts from around the country and sectors. It provides a handy twitter feed too: @ScotEduBlogs auto tweeting the posts.

I guess a lot of educators are a lot more engaged in twitter than blogging now. I think that is a pity.

You can follow ScotEdublogs by just reading the site, by following  @ScotEduBlogs or by adding the RSS feed to your feedreader.

If you are a blogger and write from a Scottish pov or about Scottish educational matters you can add you site.

 

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I just saw a provocative link from Aaron Davis, down with syndication, it was a reply on his site to an original post with that title by Ben Weirdmuller.

Arron has be a great example of an educator exploring the IndieWeb of which Ben is a major proponent.

Ben’s post is concerned with the idea of gaining more independence from the silos (twitter, Facebook and the like) and publishing more on his site. A lot of IndieWeb concepts involve publishing to your own site and sending links or repeating the posts across social media (like a link to this one will be auto posted to Twitter).

In his post Ben writes of leaving the silos behind completely. Just keeping things on his own site:

I think it might be more effective to move all the value away: publish on your own site, and use independent readers like Woodwind or Newsblur to consume content. Forget using social networks as the conduit. Let’s go full indie.

Ben mentions IndieWeb readers, that allow folk to create their own ‘syndication’ and reply, bookmark etc on their own site.

Nothing I’d disagree with there. I am quite shallow and enjoy likes, especially from Instagram coming a back to my blog via brid.gy but, in theory, I love the idea of full independence.

The provocation, to me came from the word Syndication. Before I’d heard of IndieWeb I’d been involved in DS106. This means that for me syndication means something different than a silo. To me a syndication is something set up for a group, long or short term that can be completely separate from any silos. DS106, and many other educational syndications uses a WordPress blog to syndicate content from other sites. Alan Levine, @cogdog, has set up many examples of this sort of thing.

When I was involved in the migration of Glow Blogs one of the features I managed to get included was a syndication plugin. This took quite a lot of insistence on my part, but the University of Dundee and Derek Robinson have certainly made that worthwhile with EduShare which syndicates trainee teacher reflections. 1

These non-silo syndications are, if not a gateway drug to the IndieWeb, a great way to get people considering how and where they publish to the web and how community could be built.

These syndications can be used for long running or short projects 2, the participants don’t need the expertise beyond setting up a blog. You can participate in different communities from the same blog.

The great thing about a syndication is that the content doesn’t go away if the syndication does. Any discussion can take place on the participating sites. All the hub does is make it easy to read and make connections. Micro.blog reminds me of this in many ways, although the participants are not grouped round a class or topic.

Now I am thinking I should do a lot more to publicise the possibilities for syndication in Glow Blogs.

Featured image: Silos | Darko Pevec | Flickr Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic — CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

  1. The UoD is by far the biggest and best example of syndication in Glow Blogs. I’ve used it for a couple of smaller examples but it is IMO one of the features of Glow that could be used much more widely.↩
  2. A example of a short aggregation I organised on Glow Blogs Blogging Bootcamp #2 | Get your blogs up and running Autumn 2015 ↩

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I’ve been on holiday for the last two weeks, the second spent unwell with a sinus infection that made me uninterested in everything bar Lemsip and a bit of netflix.

Feeling a bit better and reviewing my pinboard links. Most seem to be around poetry, maths and micro:bits in the classroom ( I need to get out more).

  • New Findings on Tutoring: Four Shockers

    tutoring by paraprofessionals (teaching assistants) was at least as effective as tutoring by teachers

    Teaching assistants were more effective in reading with small groups than teachers. Due perhaps to being able concentrate on the job in hand without thinking too much about the rest of the class. And:

    Tutoring does not work due to individualization alone. It works due to individualization plus nurturing and attention.

    Also volunteers were not as effective as assistants (move on not committed in the same way). I’d say a big plus for classroom/pupil/teaching assistants.

  • Misty In Roots – Peace & Love 12″ – YouTube
  • Results on ReadWriteThink – ReadWriteThink poetry interactive activities, flash based, but might be useful for ideas
  • Multiplication Grids One of many interactive and the like for maths on the mathbot.com site. Some Secondary but a lot look useful for primary.
  • Controlling a Raspberry Pi via SSH | Rosemary Orchard One of the many links I am finding via micro.blog. This has info for controlling a pi from iOS Workflow app.
  • Start Coding with the JavaScript Blocks Editor | micro:bit some microbit it activities for 8+ using the Microsoft blocks editor. looks like could be set of self directed activities. 30 minutes each.
  • 5 Ways to Celebrate Poetry | Edutopia
  • Teaching with ‘The Lost Words’ – Education With Espresso

    The Lost Words is a beautiful book created by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris. It contains not poems, but spells to conjure back certain words which have been ‘lost’.

    The first thing worth noting about this spell book is how alluring it is. I felt enticed into immersing myself in the spells and illustrations immediately. You could quite easily lose yourself for days by: soaking in every inch of detail, finding the hidden meanings of the spells and decoding the kennings.

  • Plotting live microbit sensor data in Mu | Blog My Wiki!

    I decided this would be even neater if you could untether a microbit, so here’s a project where I send accelerometer data as a string wirelessly from one microbit to another plugged into a computer running Mu. It could be great for physics experiments.

  • Parts-of-speech.Info – POS tagging online

    Enter a complete sentence (no single words!) and click at “POS-tag!”. The tagging works better when grammar and orthography are correct.

    Looks useful. I’ve seen a lot about the immersive reader in Word, but it is lacking in the iOS version of word (although present in OneNote). I like the simplicity of this and the warning:

    Computers make mistakes too!

  • p5.js | home

    Hello! p5.js is a JavaScript library that starts with the original goal of Processing, to make coding accessible for artists, designers, educators, and beginners, and reinterprets this for today’s web.

  • Sketch Machine Weird gif maker made with above p5.js
  • OK Go Sandbox

    We want to give teachers whatever tools they need to connect the joy, wonder, and fun in our videos to the underlying concepts that their students are learning.

    — DAMIAN KULASH, OK GO

    Or maybe we just wanted to have a ton of fun? Quite stunning videos. One Moment esp.

  • Digging into the Gutenberg Editor – Jeff Everhart Jeff Everhart

Header image created with above mentioned Sketch Machine.

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My class have been writing short descriptive passages about soldiers in the WW1 trenches.

At the weekend I planned for them to record these over a background of sound effects. I had spent some time at freesound.org and downloaded 20 or so effects and sounds. I had converted these to MP3 files, to reduce file size and placed these in a folder in OneDrive which I then shared. I have also made a list of credits for the files, all are Creative Commons.

The plan was to get the class to listen to the files in OneDrive then ‘open’ the ones they wanted to use in bossjock jr. These could then be loaded into ‘carts’ alongside the voice recordings. The pupils then played the different sounds and record that for their final mix.

To make sure everything went smoothly I got the whole class to open OneDrive and make sure they were logged in. That first step worked fine. The problem was OneDrive reported that there was not an internet connection and showed no files or folders. Since the class had logged into Glow this was obviously wrong.

I ended using most of the morning interval and lunchtime trying to see where the problem was. Strangely when I opened the iOS Files app when also allows you to see OneDrive files, I started slowly seeing files on the pupils iPads. And when I switched back to OneDrive the appeared there. To give the pupils access to the shared folder I needed to send a url. This opens OneDrive, and that told me I needed to open the browser, doing this, and signing on to Glow again (in the browser this time) eventually gave pupils iPads a view of the shared folder. Unfortunately I couldn’t get these to open and then open in bossjock in a timely fashion. It just was taking too long.

Time for a rethink.

On my iPad I had earlier made the files available off line in OneDrive. This took a while. I did manage to see the files in the Files app, from there I copied the MP3 files to the Notes app. 2 notes with about 10 files each. I quickly tested sharing these notes via Airdrop, it was pretty quick.

I suspected that airdropping notes with 10 audio attachments might be a bit slow, especially without Apple Classroom. I was wrong. In the afternoon I just dropped the notes to the pupils in groups of 4 or 5 at a time and in 10 minutes had distributed 20 audio files to all of the class. From there they could listen to the files in notes and copy the ones they liked to bossjock.

The rest of the afternoon when well, the children recorded their voices and mixed in the sound effects. For a first try the results were good. Next time I think we will record the audio live over the backgrounds that would allow us to duck the effects and make sure all of the words were clear. I think once the logistics of moving audio onto the iPads was sorted it becomes an interesting and valuable lesson. Fortunately the class missed all of the boring bits and no one asked why we had opened OneDrive earlier in the day.

lessons learned (again)

  • My home WiFi is faster than school.
  • Moving files locally is quicker than the cloud.
  • We can have a lot of fun with bossjock.
  • Notes and Airdrop are marvellous.

featured image, screenshot of sending audio from Notes to bossjock jr.

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One of the activities I get my class to do is to record themselves reading for self assessment. This is not particularly exciting or complicated but I think it is worthwhile.

We use bossjock jr a free iOS recording application 1. This allows pupils to record their reading. After they are finished they can export the recording into the Notes app and add their self assessment. This can then be air dropped to me. Using Apple Classroom means that I don’t have to accept the drop, it waits for me in Classroom until I’ve time to move then to my Notes. 2

From my point of view Notes is not the greatest app for organisation, but I can move the notes to a folder at least.

The pupils can also upload their recording to their e-Portfolios on Glow Blogs.

This is slightly trickier as they need to get the files somewhere they can be uploaded through the browser. This means a 2 step process:
1. Export the files from either bossjock or notes, via the Files app to iCloud or OneDrive 3
2. Choose the recording from Files in the file upload on blogs.

The class all have managed this fine, it might take a few goes for some of them to remember they need to export. 4

I love that you can ‘share’ media straight from Notes into the Files app.

I have also tested Drag and drop from Notes to Safari and that seems to work too, it seems easiest to drop it on the Upload Button in the WordPress media library.

I’ve not tested this with the pupils yet. Next time.

  1. Bossjock jr, and its paid for big brother bossjock studio, do a lot more than simple recording. They allow you to load up carts of sounds and make a recording mixing them together.↩
  2. Something has stopped classroom working on our network at school at the moment, I’ll be delighted if it can be fixed, it is a game changer for distribution and collection. ↩
  3. It looks like OneDrive is finally a full partner with the files app, we have been using iCloud, but might switch to OneDrive if it works as well.↩
  4. I share a screencast with them all showing the process, but any who needed a minding of what to do just asked me.↩

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  • DarkSiteFinder.com – Light Pollution Map Quite an amazing map. I think I can get fairly dark in about an hours drive from home. Some people are not so lucky. I’ve not seem the milky way for years. I used to see it all the time when I was a child and teen. Hopefully fix that sometime this year.
  • Designing Emotion: How Facebook Affordances Give Us The Blues – Cyborgology

    Facebook’s design features work in several ways to reinforce status quo ideas and popular people while maintaining an ancillary status for those on the margins. Given findings about the psychological effects of production versus consumption, these features then have behavioral consequences and in turn, emotional ones.

    I find this sort of think fascinating. How we are affected by software. By design or as a side effect.

  • Comic Sans: the myths, the lies and the truth about fonts

    The big question of this article, then, has a clear answer: Comic Sans use should not be justified by claims of increased readability or benefits to dyslexic students or indeed for handwriting, but if you just like it, and your pupils like it, there is no good reason you should not use it. Or not use most other fonts for that matter. Font choice, it seems, is the least of your worries.

    I’ve always followed the general prejudice against Comic Sans, but I use the similar chalkboard more often than not when making resources for pupils. In general I just don’t really notice fonts.

  • Xeromino’s Pastebin – Pastebin.com A ton of processing scripts. I used one of them this week.

Featured image: a screenshot of the DarkSiteFinder.com map.

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Happy Scribe @_getscribe

We provide you with an user friendly interface to transcribe your interviews from speech to text. Proudly made in Ireland by two students.

The prices are very reasonable, £0.09 per minute. 50p minimum charge. So I though it was worth a punt, I uploaded my most recent microcast:

And in a couple of minutes I got this back:

transcript after the jump