The Advent calendar in Glow Blogs has now 15 wee activities for mid-upper primary. 5 minutes of Christmas fun or a brain break for each day. New ones appear at 1 minute past midnight.

I have learnt a bit about the Site Editor when making the Calendar page. I used the new, to Glow, Grid Block. Each grid contains a group with a display post shortcode. The Display posts plugin allows me to show a thumbnail for the post published on a particular day. If there are no posts it just shows text of my choice. In this case ‘wait for the date’. The posts are queued up by scheduling.

There is an Advent Calendar in H5P itself, but I like the display post approach.

Each post has a simple H5P activity. Matching games, quizzes and the like.The Site Editor in Glow blogs is a really powerful tool for creating different looks. I’ve enjoyed testing the cover block a bit this weekend.

A small example of the H5P Find Multiple Hotspots content type in Glow Blogs.

I was intrigued how these wee chicks survived given the number of dogs walked along this shore in addition to plenty of gulls & crows who I would expect to enjoy a plover chick dinner. Even the adults are quite hard to spot.

I am building a collection of H5P examples on Glow Blogs. I’ve also been using it to make some spelling crosswords, word-searches and cloze procedures for my class using the North Lanarkshire spelling word list.

ChatGPT discussion screenshot. Text in blog post.

I’ve read a bit about ChatGPT use in education, there is a lot about 1

I’ve been kicking the tyres of ChatGPT a little. Even on the surface it is quite interesting.

I have tried a couple of things that might be useful. One is to get some JavaScript functions for a little fun. It did what I wanted. The other was perhaps more pertinent to teaching.

I wanted to knock out a couple of simple cloze procedures, making up sentences is one of the more tedious tasks so I though I’d give ChatGPT a shot. I asked:

Me: can you give me sentences for 10 year old using each of these words feat
feet
mail
male
leak
leek
meat
meet

ChatGPT: Sure! Here are some sentences using each of these words:

"I am so proud of my little sister's feat of climbing to the top of the jungle gym all by herself!"
"I can't believe how big my feet have gotten since I was a baby."
"I need to go to the post office to mail this letter to my pen pal in France."
"My uncle is a male doctor."
"There's a small leak in the roof that needs to be fixed before it starts raining."
"I love adding sliced leek to my salads for a little extra flavor."
"I can't wait to have a barbecue and cook some juicy meat on the grill."
"I have to go meet my friend at the library in an hour."

So I needed to fix the spelling of flavor and asked, with typo,  as in the screenshot,  for another sentence for male. I got a list. I needed to adjust the one I chose to make the lion lazy too.

It was easy enough to paste that into an H5P Fill in the Blanks Content and get a cloze in Glow Blogs.

Diversion to Other Geeky Territory

The Fill in the missing blanks content in H5P takes text with the words you want to be blank surrounded by asterisks. Since I’d copied the sentences into a text editor to replace the quotations, I set the document format to markdown, selected the words and pressed ⌘-i.

Markdown Text Edit Italic animation

I then wondered if I could get ChatGPT to add the asterisks for me, so I asked: with an asterisk before and after each word. This it did, but as it typed then it seems that ChatGPT uses markdown, so as it typed the closing astrisk the enclosed word became italic. So back TextMate for me.

A couple of links for the future of Glow Blogs & one that is useful now (go Gutenburg).

Block theme generator – Full Site Editing

Submit the form to create a .zip file with your own WordPress starter theme for full site editing.

Part of WordPress full site editing and themes – Full Site Editing

Full site editing is a set of new WordPress features that helps us edit all parts of our website: Block themes, template editing, site blocks, and global styles.

Go Gutenberg – Learn the New WordPress Editor

Find Your Way Around Gutenberg introduces a brand new writing experience for your WordPress-powered site.

We’ll show you how to navigate the new interface and save time while editing.

Liked Handy CSS for WP Presentation Privacy by Tom Woodward (bionicteaching.com)
The following bit of CSS takes care of the blurring of content in the WordPress Multisite admin users view.

This is really useful looking. I spend a lot of time taking screenshots of Glow Blogs. Blurring usernames while leaving useful information is a pain.

Listened How Accessible Is WordPress? from masterwp.com
In many instances, WordPress prioritizes accessibility in ways that other CMS’s and open source projects do not. But that doesn’t mean we do things perfectly. In this full-length episode of Press the Issue, Allie Nimmons explores WordPress accessibility from as many angles as she can in order to answer the question – how accessible is WordPress?

WE have been adding some accessibility features to Glow Blogs so I was interested to listen to this podcast. It went further than just web accessibility to discuss accessibility in the WordPress project as a whole, touching on progress & ‘politics’. Takeaways: the visitor experience with straightforward WordPress and standard themes is good. The backend, working with the new blocks editor, has some way to go.

Reposted https://twitter.com/GlowScot/status/1531893505081192449 by Glow Scot (Twitter)

Are you looking for an introduction to Glow WordPress Blogs? In this webinar @DigiLearnScot are joined by Breadalbane Academy with lots of tips on how to access and use Glow Blogs and how they are being used in the classroom! https://ow.ly/5W4550Jisbv

Guide to getting started with #GlowBlogs. Input from
@KiwiGrant21 who’s marvellous pupil poetry blog, Breadalbane Academy P7 Poetry Blog is a brilliant example with poem ideas that are just great, I’ve borrowed a few:-)