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

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  • Teaching Students to Legally Use Images Online | Cult of PedagogyMight be a nice guide to copyright.

    OPTION 1: MAKE YOUR OWN If students create their own images, then they own the copyright and can use them without having to pay any money or get permission (unless the photos are of someone else…but we’ll get to that).

    I like option 1

  • BBC – KS3 Bitesize History – The First World War : Revision A bit too much detail for my primary pupils, but should be handy for me.
  • WWI Uncut – YouTube – YouTube WWI Uncut BBC series, short programmes. Medical one looks a bit to gory for my younger pupils.
  • World War 2 timeline by lindaayers – Teaching Resources – Tes

    This can be used either as a teaching aid to help with the chronology, or printed off and laminated as a display. I have it hanging on a washing line from my ceiling and the children refer to it quite regularly. Hope it’s useful.

  • E-safey knowledge organiser.docx I am starting to notice some of these knowledge organisers popping up.
  • S3 for Poets
    Might be useful if I ever want to use Amazon S3 storage.

    S3 stands for Simple Storage Service.

    It’s a service provided by Amazon that provides storage and it’s simple. If you look at it the right way. And it’s Tuesday. And there’s a full moon. 🙂

    Simple is in the eye of the beholder. And to a programmer, like me, S3 is simple. But we forget sometimes that what seems simple to us might not seem so simple to a literate person who isn’t a programmer. For example, a poet.

    But poets need to store stuff too, and Amazon provides a great service, so let’s dive in and crash through the obstacles and get to the other side, where storage is simple. Dave Winer, New York August 2012

Image from page 109 of “The manual training school, compri… | Flickr No known copyright restrictions. Somewhat glitched.

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Just found out that if a bare link to a vimeo video is in a post in my WordPress blog it does not appear in the RSS feed and hence micro.blog & twitter. A link to an mp3 does. http://johnjohnston.info/blog/https-vimeo-com-…dness-via-kottke/

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I read a lot about twitter being a ‘toxic stew’ but I don’t see that in my stream much. My reasons for exploring other options are more around gaining a feeling of ownership, a wish to be a little more thoughtful & free myself from dopamine kicks perhaps. Still tweeting too.

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Some of the things I’ve pinned to the board this week.

  • Home – Minetest

    A free, open source voxel game engine and game. Fully extendable. You are in control.

    I installed that on a few PCs in school. Testing it in a lunchtime club. Looks like a free minecraft. Lots of possibilities. I have it running on one pc as a server and the class can connect from different PCs (WE have tested and got it working on mac & windows).

  • Let’s Enhance

    Neural network hallucinates missing details to make image look natural.

    hallucinates is an interesting choice of words.

  • How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You’ve Ever Met

    Behind the Facebook profile you’ve built for yourself is another one, a shadow profile, built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users. Contact information you’ve never given the network gets associated with your account, making it easier for Facebook to more completely map your social connections.

    Not sure if this is incredibly creepy, just the way things are heading or both.

  • That IoT Thing: Bitty Data Logger 3.0

    Bitty Data Logger is an application which can capture and chart data from a BBC micro:bit’s internal accelerometer, magnetometer and temperature sensors. It’s available for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets and for Chromebook as well. Data is, of course, transmitted from the micro:bit to your smartphone over Bluetooth so you can be some distance away from the micro:bit and…. whatever you have connected to it.

    I had a quick test with an earlier version. Lots of possibilities for the classroom, wonder when I’ll get it fitted in.

  • Something is wrong on the internet

    one of the traditional roles of branded content is that it is a trusted source. Whether it’s Peppa Pig on children’s TV or a Disney movie, whatever one’s feelings about the industrial model of entertainment production, they are carefully produced and monitored so that kids are essentially safe watching them, and can be trusted as such. This no longer applies when brand and content are disassociated by the platform, and so known and trusted content provides a seamless gateway to unverified and potentially harmful content.

    There seems to be a myriad of weird videos, automatically or semi-automatically created, earning money. Google have now said they will restrict videos that are flagged: YouTube to restrict ‘disturbing’ children’s videos, if flagged – BBC News. It seems unlikely that will deal with the problem.

Featured image, a bit of processing slit-scanning strangness, guess the source.

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The micro.blog photo challenge reminds me of my love of tags. When I started blogging using pivot a tag in my post linked to a technoratti page of posts with the same tag from around the world. We could combine that with Flickr and delicious even in the small ScotEduBlog world.

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I’ve been involved with Glow Blogs as product owner for a few years now 1. I think my main aim has been to avoid the stagnation that happened with the previous system and to keep the service as useful as possible for teachers and pupils 2.

So far we have I think managed that by keeping up with WordPress releases and adding features to improve various different aspects.

Since the rebooting of Glow in October 2014 there have been around 3 major releases of Glow Blogs every year. At the end of last session it was decided that these gradual improvements were going smoothly enough to drop back to one major release each year 3.

It was also decided to formalise the way we get ideas for improvements a little. To do this we are trying to gather suggestions in one place as opposed to the rather ad-hoc system that was in place before.

It seemed like a good idea to use the blog service itself to gather these ideas so a page has been added to the Help Blog for suggestions.

Anyone who is interested can suggest ideas and these will be triaged into the release for next summer.

This doesn’t mean that all suggestions will be taken forward. I’ve learnt my lesson a few times with suggestions of my own. Some ideas might be too expensive, some might be insecure or too difficult to implement in our setup. It was surprising how complicated adding features to Glow Blogs turned out to be. Glow Blogs is, I believe, the biggest WordPress set up in Europe so changes cannot be made lightly. On the other hand the service needs to met the needs of teachers & pupils in Scotland.

If you are a user of blogs I hope you will take a bit of time to think of how the service could be improved. Then it is just a case of filling in the form and we will take it from there. If you leave contact details with your suggestion I’ll certainly get back to you, possibly with some questions. We will also post the suggestions as they are made to the help blog to allow others to comment or express interest.

One more time, here is the link for suggestions. The cut for next years release will be at the end of November.

Featured Image: Image from page 196 of “Suggestions for handwork in school… | Flickr No known copyright restrictions.

  1. Now on a part time basis. ↩
  2. And others involved in Scottish education.↩
  3. In addition to any security releases of WordPress itself.↩