When @c told me about Twitter Atom feeds I tried it out. first fruit was reading @mrkrndvs’s tweets from #digicon18 about @lindaliukas after looking up ‘scenographers’ I ended up buying Hello Ruby
Tag: classroom
lt must not be forgotten that the basic law of children's creativitg is that its value lies not in its results, not in the product of creation, but in the process itself. It is not important what children create, but that they do create, that theg exercise and implement their creative imagination. - Vygotsky
Microsoft Aquires Flipgrid
Microsoft acquires Flipgrid, makes it free for education.
I’ve not used Flipgrid, it might be a struggle with our bandwidth, but it looks interesting. A bit late for this term, but I might look at it next session.
Given you can sign on with an O365 account I wonder if this will be considered part of Glow? You can sign-on with a google account too.
Flipgrid is where your students go to share ideas and learn together. It’s where students amplify and feel amplified. It’s video the way students use video. Short. Authentic. And fun!
from: Flipgrid – Video for student engagement and formative assessment
Naturewatch Camera in the class 1st Try
I was watching spring watch out of the corner of my eye as I did some prep last night. There was an article about making your own Wildlife cam. It looks a lot simpler than others I’ve seen and used a Raspberry Pi Zero. The BBC site had a link to My Naturewatch where you can get instructions.
This looked like something my class would enjoy using. My zero is busy taking gifs of the clouds (>70000 to date Gif Cam), so I decided to try to use a Raspberry PI 3 instead.
The instructions were really good, simple and worked first time! No soldering involved. You don’t need a monitor for the PI or any logging on through ssh in the terminal. All you need is a PI, a camera module for the PI and a power supply. I used a £2.99 phone charger. You need a plastic box and an old plastic bottle too. This is bargain basement stuff.
The way it works is the then the pi starts up it becomes a network. You connect to this with a computer or other device. You are then on that network and not the Internet. I forgot about this when showing the class and couldn’t project from an iPad;-) You then open a browser and connect to a local website on the PI. There you can start the camera and view or download the pictures.
Once the camera is started it takes a photo every time something moves in front of it.
It was raining fairly heavily this morning so we waited till about 10:15 before putting the camera out on the playground with a handful of peanuts in front of it. After 15 minutes we collected it and had a look at the photos. I am impressed. We need to think a bit about placing the camera, perhaps finding somewhere with smaller birds but the camera worked a treat.
I think this is a really useful tool for the classroom. I hope we can use it to catch some butterflies on sunnier days too. I have had a few failures with hardware Raspberry PI projects. I prefer software ones but this is certainly the most impressive for the least about of work I’ve tried. I’d recommend it highly.
Schools, teachers and learners struggle with challenges in many shapes and forms when it comes to digital portfolios.
Comprehensive look at these challenges. Lots of suggestions.
Three Quid Microscope 📷
Three quid microscope, I think this is worth it for use in the class. x30 zoom.
RE: 💬 Three Ways to Keep Track of Students’ Blog Entries
In Glow Blogs, we have the Glow Blogs Reader (Follow Blogs)
The Glow blogs reader allows you to ‘follow’ a number of Glow Blogs. In following blogs you will be able to see which of these blogs has been updated in your dashboard rather than have to visit each site to check for updates.
Useful because 1. it allows you to follow private blogs which an RSS Reader will not and 2. For teachers unfamiliar with RSS and readers it will be a lot simpler.
It doesn’t have the facility to mark off or record posts that you have commented on which is of interest to Aaron.
Microcast- Back In class
Some rather belated thoughts on returning to classroom teaching.
Featured Image: My own, my class is under the parachute.
Word Press for Weans 2018 #pressedconf18
This is a summary of my presentation for PressED – A WordPress and Education, Pedagogy and Research Conference on Twitter. I’ve pasted the text from the tweets, without the conference hash tags below.
I am @johnjohnston a primary school teacher in Scotland. I acted as ‘Product Owner’ for Glow Blogs from 2014 to 2016 & continue the role on a part time basis.
Glow is a service for to all schools & education establishments across Scotland.
Glow gives access to a number of different web services.
One of these services is Glow Blogs which runs on WordPress.
- Glow Blogs consist of 33 multisites
- Total number of blogs 219,834
- Total number of views in February 2018 1,600,074
- Number of blog users logging on in Feb 2018 243,199
All teachers and pupils in Scotland can have access to #GlowBlogs via a Single signon via RMUNIFY (shibboleth)
Development
#GlowBlogs developed & maintained by Scottish Government considerable amount of work going into dev, testing, security and data protection. This differs from many edu #WordPress set ups as changes developed relatively slowly.
Major customisations include shibboleth signon, user roles & privacy. Teachers/Pupils have slightly different permissions.
Blogs can be public, private or “Glow Only”
There is also an e-Portfolio facility added via a plugin.
How the Blogs are used
Glow Blogs are currently used for School Websites, Class Blogs, Project Blogs, Trips, Libraries, eportfolios. Blogs By Learners, Blogs for Learners (Resources, revision ect), collaborations, aggregations.
e-Portfolios
ePortfolios supported by plugin, custom taxonomy. ‘Profiles’ print or export to PDF. Pupil portfolio blogs can have sparkly unicorns or black vampire styles but the profiles that come out look clean and neat.
Pupils
Pupils can learn to be on the web but with <13 we have duty of care.
Pupils can create blogs. Cannot make blogs public.
A member of staff can make pupil’s blogs public. Pupils can be members of public blog and post publicly.
Examples
- Buzzing About Bees! | Woodlands Primary School Bee Project
- Daniel Dargue – Scottish Blacksmith in Training | A focus on the traditional style of Blacksmithing
- https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/glowblogs/uodedushare/
- Endeavour | Independent Project Based Learning on the Isle of Islay
- Glowing Posts | Collecting interesting #GlowBlogs Posts
Possibilities
Only scratched the surface of the potential of #WordPress the tools are in place, Scottish teachers and learners are exploring the possibilities but it is early days. We are tooled up for the future.
Notes and Airdrop to the rescue
My class have been writing short descriptive passages about soldiers in the WW1 trenches.
At the weekend I planned for them to record these over a background of sound effects. I had spent some time at freesound.org and downloaded 20 or so effects and sounds. I had converted these to MP3 files, to reduce file size and placed these in a folder in OneDrive which I then shared. I have also made a list of credits for the files, all are Creative Commons.
The plan was to get the class to listen to the files in OneDrive then ‘open’ the ones they wanted to use in bossjock jr. These could then be loaded into ‘carts’ alongside the voice recordings. The pupils then played the different sounds and record that for their final mix.
To make sure everything went smoothly I got the whole class to open OneDrive and make sure they were logged in. That first step worked fine. The problem was OneDrive reported that there was not an internet connection and showed no files or folders. Since the class had logged into Glow this was obviously wrong.
I ended using most of the morning interval and lunchtime trying to see where the problem was. Strangely when I opened the iOS Files app when also allows you to see OneDrive files, I started slowly seeing files on the pupils iPads. And when I switched back to OneDrive the appeared there. To give the pupils access to the shared folder I needed to send a url. This opens OneDrive, and that told me I needed to open the browser, doing this, and signing on to Glow again (in the browser this time) eventually gave pupils iPads a view of the shared folder. Unfortunately I couldn’t get these to open and then open in bossjock in a timely fashion. It just was taking too long.
Time for a rethink.
On my iPad I had earlier made the files available off line in OneDrive. This took a while. I did manage to see the files in the Files app, from there I copied the MP3 files to the Notes app. 2 notes with about 10 files each. I quickly tested sharing these notes via Airdrop, it was pretty quick.
I suspected that airdropping notes with 10 audio attachments might be a bit slow, especially without Apple Classroom. I was wrong. In the afternoon I just dropped the notes to the pupils in groups of 4 or 5 at a time and in 10 minutes had distributed 20 audio files to all of the class. From there they could listen to the files in notes and copy the ones they liked to bossjock.
The rest of the afternoon when well, the children recorded their voices and mixed in the sound effects. For a first try the results were good. Next time I think we will record the audio live over the backgrounds that would allow us to duck the effects and make sure all of the words were clear. I think once the logistics of moving audio onto the iPads was sorted it becomes an interesting and valuable lesson. Fortunately the class missed all of the boring bits and no one asked why we had opened OneDrive earlier in the day.
lessons learned (again)
- My home WiFi is faster than school.
- Moving files locally is quicker than the cloud.
- We can have a lot of fun with bossjock.
- Notes and Airdrop are marvellous.
featured image, screenshot of sending audio from Notes to bossjock jr.