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I got a new iPad today. The 8 gen model nothing fancy. Set up in a tick using my phone. I’ve installed a bunch of application, but no work ones. No FirstClass no Teams, Office, no work or glow account in mail.

Hopefully going to be a browsing, reading and blogging machine maybe messing with media a little but no work.

Over lockdown 1 and 2 my Mac has become filled with work. I sit down to do whatever and an email or teams ping. My browsers are full of tabs of teaching. My phone is pretty much the same.

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Read An Oral History of Wikipedia, the Web’s Encyclopedia
My younger sister, she was in seventh grade, had written a little report about Pablo Neruda. So, I took her school report and turned it into the Wikipedia article on Pablo Neruda.

Britta Gustafson quoted in An Oral History of Wikipedia, the Web’s Encyclopedia  by Tom Roston

via: John Naughton Wednesday 20 January, 2021 – Memex 1.1

Really interesting article about the rise of Wikipedia.

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Replied to a tweet by ds106 Daily Create (Twitter)

For today's TDC... #tdc3296 #ds106 Write a ds106-nine-years birthday poem in Lu Yu Quatrain style https://dlvr.it/RqyQcY

Fireworks is old but I love it still.
My gifs are glitchy but they have had a few likes.
#ds106 Tweets and posts bulging with inspiration flow into view.
#tdc3296, nine years you say, a butterfly dream.

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Channels in Team, screenshot
I’ve got a Team for my class with several channels. When I share to Teams from an iOS app (keynote, whatever) I can search for the Team and it shows me a list of channels. All except one.

Channels in iOS share sheet
Channels in iOS share sheet

Which just happens to be the one I want my class to share into.

I can’t seem to see anything in that channel setting that are different.

That channel also will not allow another member of staff to reply or post. Even though she is an owner of the team. Weird.

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“sorry, we can’t take you to this destination at this time”

A pupil go this error on her mum’s android phone trying to get to a Teams assignment the other day. It took a while to back & forth to find out what was going on & to find an answer, a common problem, perhaps, with multiple accounts on android. Our solution was to provide iPad.

Just hanging this here in case it helps, not with my solution but knowing it is a problem sometimes is a comfort. Also as a help to my ever older  memory.

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Teams behaved a bit better today. I got nearly the whole class in. I found that when pupil could not get access inviting them to join the call nearly all worked. This failed for one pupil.

Teams seems to use a lot of resources, a fair bit of beachballing and my fan started when searching for pupils to call in. I presume that Teams being an electron app and uses a lot of resources.

Glad I’ve got a small class, pulling in 33 one by one would be tedious.

On another positive note joining the meet with computer and iPad and then sharing screen with iPad continued to work well. I even manage to show the class team on the iPad screen in the meeting which was handy for explaining things. This is much better, I might even try PowerPoint again if things continue to improve. 1

Teams still seems a bit, what my class calls, laggy. Some pupils had difficulty uploading files to assignments. I found even small images were slow to post.

On a side note the Education Scotland – status page is nice

1. Things improved last lockdown when I had: Simpler Meets ↩

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Lockdown 2 day 1

Well we didn’t get off to a great start.

Working from home today.

I’d set out a light weeks program in a blog post for the pupils and emailed the parents. In both post and email I’d try to make it clear we were trying to really get every pupil involved from the start.

Planned our first Team meeting for 2pm as that was the same time we used in the first lockdown.

Teams seemed to get off to a bad start across the country.

A number of schools, pupils and parents have reported the technology running slowly or not at all.

This didn’t cause me as much problems as some. I upload most of the files I want the pupils to use to the class blog. I figure this avoids password problems. Also Teams slowdown.

It did seem to cause problems in our meeting. Only about half the pupils managed to get on. The others could access Teams but not get onto the meeting. Hard to know if this was related to the reported problem or not. It was certainly frustrating seeing the messages from the class repeatedly trying to get in.

Worth noting that I joined the meeting on my mac and iPad. The iPad on mute and used as a screen share. This has improved a lot since the first lockdown. Joining on the iPad second it gave me a choice to swap to it or join without audio. The latter let me share the iPad screen, and from what I could tell it was not to laggy (as the pupils say). Laterally in the first lockdown I abandoned screen sharing or using PowerPoint and just share files in the chat as we had a pretty bad experience. This gives me hope for an improved experience.