Tag: glowblogs

Posted on
by
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.

  1. ChatGPT & Education – Google Slides and Some ill-formed thoughts about AI, robot colleagues, resistance, refusal. are both interesting. ↩
Posted on
by

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.

Posted on
by
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.

Posted on
by
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:-)

Posted on
by

Well I am quite excited. There is a new plugin in Glow Blogs, H5P. This is quite different from anything else in blogs.

H5P is a system for creating interactive HTML5 content. It can work inside several types of publishing platforms including WordPress.

The range of content types that you can create with H5P is pretty wide. Some are ways of presenting material, accordions, image galleries. Others are learning activities, quizzes, multi-choice questions, word searches and crosswords. More sophisticated types include interactive video. Videos can be paused by viewers to respond to questions and quizzes and 360 tours. Responses to quizzes, cloze procedures etc are gathered from logged on users.

You can combine these content types , or display them on a blog in different ways.

I’ve spent a bit of time making some simple examples for Glow Blogs which has allowed me to start to think about how best to use these.

I’ve also started to build up a small bank of resources for spelling for my class: igh example. So far I am only scratching the surface.

I’ve always enjoyed making online resources for my classes to use. but these can take a lot of time and can be difficult to make presentable or present. The H5P plug-in solves many of these problems and are made “inside” the blog.
Having them on a blog allows resources to be quite easily organised. The Display Posts plug-in or using the make theme helps. Post listing in Gutenberg will be useful too.

Here are a couple of examples embedded from Glow Blogs.

A 360 tour:

and a fill in the missing words exercise.

Posted on
by
screenshot of pi.johnj.info/gb

One of the things I am interested in as part of my work on Glow Blogs is what people are using Glow Blogs for.

Glow Blogs is made of of 33 different WordPress multi-sites. One for each Local Authority in Scotland and one central one.

The home page of each LA lists the last few posts. Visiting these pages will give you an idea of what is going on. In the past I’ve opened up each L.A. in a tab in my browser and gone through them. I had a script that would open them all up. I’ve now worked out an easy way to give a quick overview.

Recently I noticed shot-scraper ,Tools for taking automated screenshots of websites . I’ve used various automatic webpage screenshot pages in the past. These have usually been services that either charge money or have shut down. I used webkit2png a wee bit, but ran into now forgotten problems, perhaps around https?

shot-scraper can be automated and extended. It is a command line tool and using these is always an interesting struggle. I usually just follow any instructions blindly, searching any problems as I go. In this case it didn’t take tool long.

Once installed shot-scraper is pretty easy to use. shot-scraper https://johnjohnston.info Dumps an image johnjohnston-info.png

There are a lot of options, you can output jpegs rather than pngs. Run some javascript before taking a screenshot or wait for a while. you can even choose a section of the page to grab.

So I can use shot-scraper to create screenshots of each LA homepage. Then display them on a web page for a quick overview of Glow Blogs.


    #!/bin/bash

    cd /Users/john/Documents/scripts/glowscrape/img

    URLLIST="ab as ac an ce cl dd dg ea ed el er es fa fi gc glowblogs hi in mc my na nl or pk re sa sb sh sl st wd wl"
    for i in $URLLIST ;
    do
        /usr/local/bin/shot-scraper -s "#glow-latest-posts" -j "jQuery('.pea_cook_wrapper').hide()" --quality 80 https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/"$i" -o  "$i".jpg && continue
    done;

This first hides the cookie banner displayed by blogs and then screenshots the #glow-latest-posts section of the page only.

The script continues by copying the image over to my raspberry pi where they are shown on a web page

I hit a couple of problems along the way. The first was that the script stopped running when it could not find the #glow-latest-posts section. This happens on a couple of LAs who have no public blogs. adding && continue to the screenshot fixed that.

The second problem came when I wanted to run the script regularly. OSX schedules tasks with launchd. I’ve used Lingon X to schedule a few of these. Since I recently updated my system I first needed to get a new version of Lingon X. I then found that increased security gave me a few hoops to jump through to get the script to run.

I think it would have been simpler to do the whole job on a raspberry pi. But I was not sure if it would run shot-scraper. I’ll leave that for another day and a newer pi.

This is a pretty trivial use of a very powerful tool. I’ve now got a webpage that gives me a quick overview of what is going on in Glow Blogs and took another baby step in bash.

The first thing that surprised me was the lack of featured Images on the blog posts. These not only make the LA home pages took nicer they also make display blog posts on twitter more attractive.

Posted on
by

I’ve had to search for this one several times so putting it here so that it might make it stick or be easier to find.

Sometimes working with my pupils I want to send them to a blog, have them logged on but not go to the dashboard.

the login url has a redirect_to parameter.

So I I use a url like
blog-address/wp-login.php?redirect_to=page-I-want-the-pupil-to-go-to

Where blog-address is the blog I want them to log on to and page-I-want-the-pupil-to-go-to is a relative or full url

I often share notes to my class via AirDrop and hide long urls but typing a name, selecting it and making it a link, ⌘-k on mac. Unfortunalty you have to create linked text in another app on iOs and paste it in.

Posted on
by

RSS Via Shortcode for Page & Post

I’ve been using this plugin on several pages on this site for a while. Recently I’ve seen errors on some of the pages and occasionally on other posts pointing to this plugin. I checked and it has not been updated for 7 years, so decided to pull the plug.

Rather than find a new plugin I just changed the pages to use the new Blocks editor and add feeds using some blocks.

For some I used the Display Remote Posts Block – WordPress plugin. This I discovered & installed through the add block interface & found later that it has installed a plugin. On others I used the built in RSS & podcast player blocks. All three seem to do the job.

Examples: RSS block, Podcast Block & Display Remote Posts.

I am not ready for the Block editor full time on this blog. I’ve been exploring it a little on Glow Blogs. But I’ve got a few things here that are incompatible (eg. Post Kinds plugin) and for my blog the classic editor, is usually more than enough.