Replied to a tweet by Kenny Pieper (Twitter)

'Twitter did something that I would not have thought possible: It stole reading from me. What is it stealing from you?' https://twitter.com/janinegibson/status/1412044936476872704

1. Reading your & other blogs.
2. Resources, Twitter is good for easy short term sharing not for long term discovery.
3. Time

Posting this via my blog, where it belongs and is organised by me in my online memory.

Replied to Love Love That Dog (CogDogBlog)
As part of doing some sessions at UBC in June, I got some gift cards to use at the bookstore, and picked up some heavy pieces of literature. Tha…

Hi Alan,
I, somewhat serendipitously, read this post recently. Didn’t notice the date.
The book arrived, £2.29 including p&p, this morning.
Marvellous book and I think it will a great resource when I go back to school in August.

Read: Pew by Catherine Lacey ★★★★☆ 📚
The main character has little memory and their sex, colour, age and origin are all in doubt. They are discovered in church and meet the locals, good folks to their own thinking, without talking Pew revels them to us. We never find out about Pew and the ending is ambiguous.

But we’ve always been fair to people according to what the definition of fair was at the time

The book begins with a quote from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas – which I’ve not read for a long time.

Today is the day. North Lanarkshire is retiring our communication application FirstClass. Uses in schools for e-mail, file storage and discussion forums.
 
I remember starting in North Lanarkshire in October 2008. I saw FirstClass for the first time. Even then it’s UI looked a little outdated. Over the years I can to appreciate some of it qualities. Excellent usability on a very poor mobile signal. Compared to other email solutions it feels very lightweight, in a good way.
 
I learnt a little of its other features, some of which were good, some a bit clunky (the web publishing).
 
At the end of my time at the computer centre, FirstClass developed a web frontend. This was a more modern UI, but I only saw that briefly. NLC continued to use the desktop application.
 
While I was an ICT dev officer I spent a lot of time in firstClass. After returning to the classroom I continued to use it every day. It will be strange not to open it up anymore.
Read Outdoor learning has improved our pupils' attainment by Jay Helbert
Children here at early level experience 50 per cent of learning and play outdoors, those at first level have 33 per cent and second level children have a quarter of their school time outdoors. This has enabled the school to use a mixture of formal and informal learning outdoors to build in play-based and pupil-led learning, which, in turn, has helped to reduce anxiety and build resilience.

Really positive article in TES by Jay Helbert💙 (@learningjay) .

Our Forest School (in the grounds of Argyll Estate) and Beach School (on the shore of Loch Fyne) provide opportunities for a blended experience. These lessons take place weekly over the course of a school term and are child-centred experiences where teachers set up learning “provocations” and options for activities ranging from den-building and mapping to creating artwork and storytelling.

I’ve done a bit of outdoor learning in school but nowhere near the 25% the second level classes are managing here. I was interested to see this maths idea:

where children survey plant and animal species to gather data

I sometimes struggle to think up second level ideas for literacy & numeracy. I’ve mostly found early and first level ideas online.

The outdoors a great stimulus for writing, reports, narrative and poetry. Talking and listening seem built in. In maths we have done a fair bit of shape & measure and I can see the potential for data and related activities. It would be good to see a bank of ideas. 25% is more than once a week.

Bonus thought, has TES Scotland become a sort of medium for educational blogging. I am reading a lot of good stuff on TES.