Tag: classroom

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Scratch is now at version 3.0. I’ve been looking forward to this as it will now support the iPads my class uses.

I gave it half an hour or so on my iPad and am delighted to say that it does what is says on the tin. The iPad I am using is an Air 1 so a good few years old. It was a little laggy now and again but nothing that I worried about.

I was especially delighted to see that old scratch embeds still word and now work on iOS too the Scratch Embed example on Glow Blog Help just worked.

I also tried exporting a Pyonkee project and then importing it into scratch 3 on the iPad that worked too. Pyonkee is an iOS app that is based on scratch 1.4 that my class have been using.

I look forward to introducing the class to scratch on iOS in the new term.

Here are a couple of useful links:

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Since I have an on this day page on my blog I’ve been finding old me interesting.

Yesterday I notice quite a few end of year reviews published on the last day of the year1.

Blogging highlights 3, followed 1 & 2 in 2006 but focused on the blogging my pupils (primary 6 ~10yr olds) carried out that year.

The links go to the internet archive now. Images and some links were broken but I enjoyed reading them.

I was surprised at the comments on the posts, from adults, pupils at other schools and classmates. At the time the idea of an audience and conversation was one of the main reasons I had pupils in my class blogging. We were posting photos, video, microcasting and writing poems.

It seems harder to get comments on pupils blog now. I admit I’ve not commented outside my own class lately.

This was the year before I was on twitter. A lot of the online conversation about what happens in classrooms has moved to there. While a lot of this is interesting and valuable it has mostly removed pupils from the publishing process 2. This is I believe a loss.

  1. I was thinking of writing one for 2018 but got lost in following these old posts. ↩
  2. see also ‘School social media has been terrible at engaging parents’ | Tes News by Susan Ward ↩
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Replied to Susan Ward on Twitter (Twitter)
“Why social media ain't all that when it comes to engaging parents and how schools can unlock its real potential https://t.co/mRBaxMi5xc @ITLWorldwide @SBCEducation1 @DigitalscotNews @DigiLearnScot @Wilson722Wilson @TESScotland @TeacherToolkit @TeamSCEL @pedagoo”

Great stuff Susan. I wonder if blogging is a better approach to sharing than twitter. Easier for pupils to be part of the process? I know twitter is seem as simpler but I worry about encouraging pupils to a service which may not haver their best interests at heart.

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I was interested in this app when I read about it on micro.blog when the developer @becky posted about. I didn’t have a phone that took live photos at that point, so put it in my memory.

Today it popped back out and I installed it. I looks like it will be a useful app. It allows you to choose either live photos or videos and stitches then together. you can add title screens and audio, either from iTunes or some built in tracks1.

This solves the problem with how to share live photos. I have exported these as gifs from photos on a mac but the files are huge.

You can export 30 second watermarked videos for free and a £2.99 unlocks that limit 2.

I guess the app will mostly be used with live photos, to knock out a quick video and these will be short. It might be interesting to experiment with a little DIY ‘Ken Burns’ I an certainly thinking of holding the camera for longer when taking photos.

Anyway I really like the app,  the interface is great and it performs a useful task really nicely. I imagined  I’ll use it  to summarise a walk or a get my class to record a  school activity.

I think this could be an interesting classroom app, its simplicity and lack of features will, perhaps, be a better solution than the likes of clips or iMovie for a quick movie. Most of the iPads in my class are original Airs, too long in the tooth for live photos, but we have a few newer ones so I hope to give it a go.

Here is a quick video I made the morning while Christmas shopping.

  1. Most seem to be by Kevin Macleod a long time favourite of my classroom.↩
  2. I think 30 seconds is plenty for this sort of video, a few live photos, but I paid anyway. If we use it at school we will stick to the free version. ↩

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Some links I’ve put on my virtual pinboard recently. Ready for the new term?

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Daring Fireball: Sometimes It’s Better to Just Start Over With iCloud Photo Library Syncing

Next, I wanted to delete every single photo and video from my iPhone. To my knowledge there is no easy way to do this on the iPhone itself. (There are a lot of tasks like this that are easy on the Mac thanks to Edit → Select All that are painfully tedious on iOS.) I connected the iPhone to my Mac with a Lightning cable and used Image Capture to delete all photos and videos from my phone. Image Capture just treats the iPhone like a regular camera. Image Capture crashed three times during this process (I’m still running MacOS High Sierra 10.13.6, for what it’s worth), but after the fourth run the iPhone had no photos or videos lefp.

I just deleted all the photos from a school iPad yesterday by selecting a couple and the dragging to select the rest. Worked with ~3000 photos but a bit clunky. I’ll use Image Capture in future. It’s an application I don’t remember very often.

In a 1-2-1 iPad class I do get a lot of benefit from having a mac in school. There a several things that can be solved with a quick airdrop to the mac and back. Given the iPads and mac are of similar vintage (2012).

I’ll edit a note on the mac, it syncs to the iPad (instantaneously it feels like) and I can Airdrop to class or group via classroom app. Now the Classroom app is available for the mac I need to think about upgrading the ageing mac to Mojave. I think it is new enough but spinning hard disk and skimpy ram might be a problem?

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Here are some of the things I’ve tagged classroom over the summer holidays.

  • A garden alive with art: all-natural insect sculptures – in pictures I think my class might like this as it combines outdoors, insects and art. I suspect it is trickier than it looks to get these sorts of results.

    Inspired by the art of ikebana – a traditional style of Japanese flower arranging – Montreal-based artist Raku Inoue hand-crafts bugs using materials from his garden. He transforms his garden waste, including sticks, seeds and petals, to create his Natura Insects series. “I think about the main shape of the insect,” he says, “and try to find something to satisfy that. It’s very much like a puzzle.” As the year progresses, his creative options change. “I choose the materials according to what nature offers during that time. All four seasons offer many different materials to play with.” The series started as a morning routine over coffee to sharpen his thoughts for the day. “It was never meant to be a complex process, but rather an easygoing, morning mind-stretching exercise.”

  • Problem Solving: Grade 4 Mathematics There looks like there is a lot of resources on this site.
  • Control Alt Achieve: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

    To prove this I have used Google Sheets to create a “Random Writing Prompt Generator” that randomly pulls from a list of about 2,000 adjectives and 1,000 nouns to create over 2 million unique prompts. See below to get your own copy of the Sheet, learn how it works, and get more ideas on how to help your students write poems, stories, or other creations.

  • Create & Innovate with Keynote Pile of resources for keynote in classroom, links, embeded videos and some templates. (All About Me, Choose Your Own Adventure, Coding with Keynote, Eclipse Animations, Green Screen, Holograms, Illuminated Text (Poetry in Motion), Infographics, Invisible Buttons, Learning Journals, Prototype, Quiz Shows, Selfie Bingo & Shape Stories. )
  • The Literacy Calendar 2018-19 – Literacy with Miss P The following table provides a map of the academic year with a range of key calendar events. It includes national days or weeks and a whole host of school competitions and events. I’ve also added some key children’s literature award dates as it’s always good to keep an eye out for new and exciting quality texts.
  • ADE Worldwide Institute 2018: 5 Star Points From The Lone Star State. | Next Generation Learning; Today… As far as Pages is concerned, it too has brilliant functionality with the Apple Pencil, effectively becoming a powerful sketching tool as well. The workflow means you can easily create interactive EPUB books that can be viewed in iBooks. When starting a document, scroll down to find the Books template. Once selected, you can add text, photos, image galleries, videos, shapes, tables, charts and your own drawings to your document. On iOS you can also record audio directly to your document. This effectively means we will no longer need to spend £5 on purchasing the Book Creator App.
  • Lesson Plans – The Art of Ed
  • Bio Poem template PDF. I’ve used and amended this many times, unfortunately I’ll not be able to this year as for some of my pupils this is the third year in my class!

    A Bio Poem is all about you. It is a way for you to introduce yourself to others. Take some time to think about yourself – your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Then, use the template and example below to write your own Bio Poem.

  • Mr. Fahey’s Tech: UPDATED!!! 13 Ways to Enhance Math Lessons with Flipgrid

Featured image: my own, I spent a fair bit of the summer trying to get close to butterflies.