Read ‘Sometimes I wonder if I’ll come back’: Palestinian birdwatchers defy danger to scan the skies by Guardian staff reporter
Gathering on a wooded hilltop overlooking terraces of olive trees and vineyards, a group of ninth-grade girls from the Aida refugee camp watch as Michael Farhoud, a researcher at the Environmental Education Centre (EEC) in Beit Jala, attaches a ring to the leg of a chiffchaff. The tiny olive-brown warbler was caught in nets that morning. Farhoud explains to the schoolgirls how ringing tracks birds' movements.

I saw a chiffchaff or willow warbler with a ring the other day. I wonder if it had passed through Palestine.

Kauffmann said that France has never officially embraced big tech in schools, which makes the project easier, and that the public generally is skeptic towards monopolies and the abuse of private data. The country is thus undergoing a cultural shift in the digital education sector, promoting the use of free, open, and interoperable code, data, and content, referred to as “digital commons”. This approach encompasses not only free licenses but also community involvement and governance.

How France Adopts An Open Source-Based Education Strategy – Free of Big Tech · Dataetisk Tænkehandletank

Found via a boost from @FourthWorld@mastodon.online might be an exciting move from France. Back in 2014-15 when I was working with Ian Stuart on the Glow Scotland reboot, we talked a lot about OpenSource and, AFAIR, talked to someone who came over from Paris to show us an open source solution they were using there at the time.

Grass in the foreground 2 blurred people behind

My last day of term plan yesterday was a scavenger hunt, Capture the Flag and tidy our MakerSpace.

The scavenger hunt was made in Keynote, a slide for each challenge.

I’ve recently read Digital Scavenger Hunts – DigiLearnFalk which shows how to make really attractive one-slide digital hunts in keynote. Using place holders. They have even some nice templates to use.

My own approach is much less attractive. I wanted quite a long list of ‘things’ to find and wanted to add audio to the video/photo mix. The result is much uglier, but only takes a couple of minutes to make.

I write (or copy from a list or lists found online ) & edit the list in a text editor. Then copy it.

  1. Open Keynote & make a new Presentation.
  2. Create a title slide.
  3. Make a new slide and set the from a to section heading
  4. Change the view to outline and paste in my list. This makes a slide for each line.
  5. Select all the new slides and choose Reapply Layout to Slide from the Format menu.
  6. Edit the Slide Layout and move the section heading to the top.
Keynote Scavenger Hunt – No Audio

I use Keynote every day in my class. Perhaps unfortunately for my class, I spend very little time designing slides. I mainly choose the default black on white theme. I try to follow the advice of Robert Macmillan and keep my slides simple.

The class didn’t have time on Wednesday to do more than make the slides and then we reviewed them together. Given more time, it could have been a fun task for the pupils to make the slides look good.