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.