Kind: Articles

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

Posted on
by

From tomorrow I’ll be back in the digital classroom. I can’t say I’m very happy about it. For all my love of technology I much prefer the real classroom.

I’ve been reviewing my previous lockdown experience, I continue to find reading my old blog posts useful.  Also interesting to see what happened in the first week of term last session.

Last time I felt I spent very little time learning new stuff or seeing what other people were doing. As I recall my head was down. I believed that I cut out social media pretty much. I just had a look at my 2020 twitter stats:

And was surprised to see I was wrong about that.

It feel like there is a lot more pressure on this time round. I think, as teachers, we put enough pressure on ourselves, not sure the idea of teachers, schools and LAs having to produce data to justify themselves is a great idea. I gathered my own last time, and held myself to account  blogged about it, that felt tough enough.

I certainly hope that whoever tries to hold us to account understands the situation, the amount of prep needed to teach online, whether preparing for a live lesson or creating asynchronous ones.

Posted on
by

During the last lockdown I made a wee webpage to use instead of a whiteboard and magnetic letters for phonics. It might be useful to someone else: Word Makers. Made with iPads in mind. It presents a list of  words and you can drag letters around. Here is a 30 second screencast (silent).

The words are from NLC lists.

There is a table of contents:

and a general board:

Doubtless a few bugs but someone might find it useful.

Posted on
by

Books I’ve read this year. displayed with my favourite plugin display posts. I’ve found it useful to post books I’ve read. I need to write slightly better notes next year. Lockdown increased my reading a little. 30/10 male to female authors reflect the fact I get a lot of books after my wife.

Posted on
by

Wednesday evening I hurried home after school to join the zoom meeting for the launch of the Virtual exhibition Doing Data Differently.

In the current climate, discussions about data in schools are usually linked to pupil attainment, data are represented using charts and graphs, and teachers rarely initiate data collection themselves or use it for their own purposes. The widespread use of attainment data in schools has been widely criticised for its impact on the curriculum, on teaching and learning, and on teacher and pupil wellbeing.

I’d heard of the project from Ian Guest, @IaninSheffield, an academic working on the project and an online pal. Ian did interesting work on teachers use of twitter. We talked to him about this and many other things on Radio EduTalk. Ian took a rather individual approach to gathering data during his phd.

The virtual launch was a great taster for the Doing Data Differently site or exhibition. If the idea of data in education is unattractive this will change your mind. The recording of data was done on postcards in very creative ways. A quick scroll down the Metaphors, for example, collection gives you different view of “data”.

I was particularly interested in was the amount of discussion and excitement generated by the postcards. One mention returning to change something in her class immediately. Perhaps I heard someone saying that the project vaccinated them against data. An interesting idea.

I felt that these postcards gathered more complex, subtle, less easily simplified data. This could be approached conversationally as opposed to mathematically.

The project is continued in a colloquium on vimeo. I’ve listened to the first, thanks huffduffer, Data harms and inequalities and queued up a couple more. The first was an interesting discussion of data misuse, bias, and bad algorithms. I am guessing that the videos are more academic than the postcards and should compliment thinking about data use in education in the round.

There is a lot more for me to read and think about on the site. It is facinating seeing an unusual view of other teachers practise.

Posted on
by

This is harder than it used to be.

We have just added our class podcast to iTunes I though it might be worth noting the steps.

The RSS feed from Glow Blogs is not optimised for podcasts so I used Feedburner to create one. You need a google account to set up on Feedburner. Once you have done that you add your RSS feed from your blog to Feedburner and tick the podcast box.

An important setting is to have an image for the podcast art.
You need to upload a square image bigger than 1400 by 1400 pixels for iTunes. Remember to change the maximum size in Settings-> Media as by default Glow Blogs resizes image bigger than 1200 pixels. Then add the URL for that image to Feedburner.

You end up with a url for your podcast feed, ours is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/BantonBiggiesPodcast

you then submit that at the apple iTunes Connect site. You need an Apple ID for that. It is pretty straightforward. You can check the feed and submit it.

Feedburner is showing its age and is missing some of the tags that Apple likes but it still works. Feedburner was taken over by google a while back and I hope it does not go the way of Google Reader. I don’t know of another free service like it?

My classes podcast is approaching episode 1 and we are having a deal of fun working on it.

Posted on
by

I started a podcast in my previous school in 2005 which produced episode fairly regularly until 2008 when I moved to a development officer post in North Lanarkshire.

I found podcasting to really worthwhile, fun and motivating. It involved children in all sorts of learning and created many opportunities.

I’ve also produced a fair number of podcast over at EduTalk and play with microcasting  here.

I spent a fair bit of time in my development post trying to encourage the practise. Ironically I had more luck with video podcasting and for a while we had a Mac server running podcast producer which could server audio and video podcasts.

When I started work on Glow I was particularity keen to promote podcasting using Glow Blogs but didn’t see a lot of uptake.

Since returning to class in 2016 I’ve had podcasting in the back of my mind, we have, I think, posted the odd bit of audio to our class blog but until now now made a big deal of podcasting.

This session I decided to get it into our plans covering in particular:

By experiencing the setting up and running of a business, I can collaborate in making choices relating to the different roles and responsibilities and have evaluated its success.
SOC 2-22a

We are going to produce a multi-episode podcast and look for sponsorship to make it into a business.

There are an amazing number of opportunities in making a podcast for pupils including: writing, recording and editing, making a website, graphics production, finding sponsorship and publicity. We have already ticked of many of the skills that we audit in our learning.

I’ve also been learning a bit about GarageBand and how it has changed since the last time I used it. Exploring software with pupils is a great way for them to learn. My needs for podcasting for Edutalk were met by a wee bit of audacity and the levelator, not complex, but pupils are a bit more ambitious. I am also stepping out of my mac comfort zone and using the pupils iPads for the whole thing, or at least they are. They  are organising things in Teams (to include an isolating graphic person last week) and using the pupils iPads. GarageBand for recording, notes for writing, Teams for working together, brushes, sketches & keynote for graphics, numbers for organisation. Personally I would be using a different set of apps on a mac for these tasks. Moving to the pupils devices gives them control and puts me in an advisory role.

So far we have organised teams for different roles, made a start on a blog, graphics, scriptwriting. Our first bit of publicity has gone out and I cooped my daughter into a Skype visit to talk about her job as a tv producer (and her experience of working on a podcast).

We have started recording episode zero and I hope that will be published on the new podcast site next week. It is good to be back podcasting in class.

Posted on
by

Microsoft Thinks You’ve Been Missing Your Commute in Lockdown – WSJ

Teams’ morning commute experience hasn’t been finalized, but will involve asking users to write a short list of things they want to accomplish that day, Ms. Janardhan said. It also will ask how users are feeling before they start work. If they say they are feeling overwhelmed, the virtual commute assistant will ask if they want to block time off in their calendars to focus on work or de-stress.

John Naughton though this was a spoof.

I’d love to block out some time in my calendar to de-stress but I don’t think this one is aimed at a school day.

The last thing I want to do in a commute (real or virtual) is “write a short list of things I want to accomplish that day”.

I’ve spent the best part of 40 years commuting in one way or another, mostly on trains and latterly by car, so I have experience.

Driving to work I listen to the radio, or podcasts or music. I keep an eye out for the seasons, nature & roadkill. I think, let my mind drift. I might write, in my head, a haiku.

Occasionally I might think about school if I realise the days plan is flawed, or I worry about need to get something done. Wondering how I’ll manage that between 20 to eight and the bell at nine.

I might have a great idea or notion about something I could teach, and work out how to fit it in.

I do not want to systematically want to go through the day taking more time up with routine or timetables, I want this slack time for myself & serendipity. If I am locked down again, or get into a position where I work from home, I’d rather manage my transition from breakfast to work without a piece of software asking me questions.

Posted on
by

Given I want a nice gentle start for my class this session I thought we would play with Vedic Squares. I was reminded of these and their possibilities from a tweet I’d bookmarked from Blair Minchin.

We started on Last Thursday making multiplication grids then vedic squares, making patterns by joining the same numbers with lines.

 

The next day we recreated the grids in Numbers. I then explained conditional highlighting so that the class could colour the grid. They were fascinated by both the process and the results. The Gallery below steps through the process.

The next step was to screenshot the grids and place them in keynote to duplicate and create symmetrical patterns. At this point some of the class started animating their patterns to rotate madly in keynote. At that point gifs became obvious;-)

Here is the process in Keynote.

For a gif purist like myself Keynote gifs are a bit off. Very big files indeed. This got a little better after I explained that they didn’t need 999 rotations for a gif, one would do. Getting rid of any easing in the rotation and any delay in the export gives a straightforward rotation.

A quick screencast of rotation settings and gif export:

I particularly enjoyed the excitement as the class saw the conditional highlighting in action and then that the animation step was suggested by the pupils. There is still a lot to explore around both the patterns and processes. I hope that the class will further explore both, opening up links to maths, R.E. and art.

Although we used iPad, Apple Numbers and Keynote I am sure you could do the same with Excel & PowerPoint.