🗓️ ♥︎
Not too many links this week due to my rather than mb’s lack.
🗓️ ♥︎
Not too many links this week due to my rather than mb’s lack.
@mrkrndvs likesIn the Web’s Hyperreality, Information Is Experience
A leak! @AndySylvester & @ron starting Bob Dylan River
Comments @bradenslen thinks & @smokey mentions
@mdhughes uses Applescript
@simonwoods has Eleven micro.blog highlights
Some links I’ve put on my virtual pinboard recently. Ready for the new term?
has over 1,150 Project Ideas in all areas of science
The Free Universal Construction Kit: a matrix of nearly 80 adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten* popular children’s construction toys. By allowing any piece to join to any other, the Kit encourages totally new forms of intercourse between otherwise closed systems—enabling radically hybrid constructive play, the creation of previously impossible designs, and ultimately, more creative opportunities for kids.
This looks as if it could be very useful for schools.
"Batteries in parallel and in series. 3D visualization of energy, voltage, and the flow of electric current in a circuit." https://t.co/PXURXHEdm6
Never seen circuit electricity presented quite like this. Interesting #Physics— Ian Guest (@IaninSheffield) October 5, 2018
Our Forest, Our Future helps teachers and pupils to explore the interdependence of people and forests and the vital role forests play in sustaining our environment – in the past, the present and hopefully the future.
Here are some of the things I’ve tagged classroom over the summer holidays.
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.”
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.
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.
Featured image: my own, I spent a fair bit of the summer trying to get close to butterflies.
I’ve been on holiday for the last two weeks, the second spent unwell with a sinus infection that made me uninterested in everything bar Lemsip and a bit of netflix.
Feeling a bit better and reviewing my pinboard links. Most seem to be around poetry, maths and micro:bits in the classroom ( I need to get out more).
tutoring by paraprofessionals (teaching assistants) was at least as effective as tutoring by teachers
Teaching assistants were more effective in reading with small groups than teachers. Due perhaps to being able concentrate on the job in hand without thinking too much about the rest of the class. And:
Tutoring does not work due to individualization alone. It works due to individualization plus nurturing and attention.
Also volunteers were not as effective as assistants (move on not committed in the same way). I’d say a big plus for classroom/pupil/teaching assistants.
The Lost Words is a beautiful book created by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris. It contains not poems, but spells to conjure back certain words which have been ‘lost’.
The first thing worth noting about this spell book is how alluring it is. I felt enticed into immersing myself in the spells and illustrations immediately. You could quite easily lose yourself for days by: soaking in every inch of detail, finding the hidden meanings of the spells and decoding the kennings.
I decided this would be even neater if you could untether a microbit, so here’s a project where I send accelerometer data as a string wirelessly from one microbit to another plugged into a computer running Mu. It could be great for physics experiments.
Enter a complete sentence (no single words!) and click at “POS-tag!”. The tagging works better when grammar and orthography are correct.
Looks useful. I’ve seen a lot about the immersive reader in Word, but it is lacking in the iOS version of word (although present in OneNote). I like the simplicity of this and the warning:
Computers make mistakes too!
Hello! p5.js is a JavaScript library that starts with the original goal of Processing, to make coding accessible for artists, designers, educators, and beginners, and reinterprets this for today’s web.
We want to give teachers whatever tools they need to connect the joy, wonder, and fun in our videos to the underlying concepts that their students are learning.
— DAMIAN KULASH, OK GO
Or maybe we just wanted to have a ton of fun? Quite stunning videos. One Moment esp.
Header image created with above mentioned Sketch Machine.
The tabs left open from yesterday. The internet is a more fascinating place that I’ve got time for.
Worth mentioning that a lot of these links are coming from micro.blog as well as my RSS reader.
Some recent finds collected with pinboard
A collection of bite-size videos taking the user through free VR using Thimble and A-Frame to make relative simple and quick Web VR.
The true scale of the problem is hard to gauge, but our best guess is that there might now be as many as 1.5m deer in the UK, at least half of them in Scotland; more than at any time since the last ice age.
Might be good info for class discussion/debate/writing
now entering her fourth winter of carefully embossing serif letters into light snowfall. Before this weekend, the most recent sentence, composed entirely during a snowfall in March, 2017, cut off in the middle:
Featured images, a montage of gifs from skipi, which is stuttering away. For no particular reason.
OPTION 1: MAKE YOUR OWN If students create their own images, then they own the copyright and can use them without having to pay any money or get permission (unless the photos are of someone else…but we’ll get to that).
I like option 1
This can be used either as a teaching aid to help with the chronology, or printed off and laminated as a display. I have it hanging on a washing line from my ceiling and the children refer to it quite regularly. Hope it’s useful.
S3 stands for Simple Storage Service.
It’s a service provided by Amazon that provides storage and it’s simple. If you look at it the right way. And it’s Tuesday. And there’s a full moon. 🙂
Simple is in the eye of the beholder. And to a programmer, like me, S3 is simple. But we forget sometimes that what seems simple to us might not seem so simple to a literate person who isn’t a programmer. For example, a poet.
But poets need to store stuff too, and Amazon provides a great service, so let’s dive in and crash through the obstacles and get to the other side, where storage is simple. Dave Winer, New York August 2012
Image from page 109 of “The manual training school, compri… | Flickr No known copyright restrictions. Somewhat glitched.
Some of the things I’ve pinned to the board this week.
A free, open source voxel game engine and game. Fully extendable. You are in control.
I installed that on a few PCs in school. Testing it in a lunchtime club. Looks like a free minecraft. Lots of possibilities. I have it running on one pc as a server and the class can connect from different PCs (WE have tested and got it working on mac & windows).
Neural network hallucinates missing details to make image look natural.
hallucinates is an interesting choice of words.
Behind the Facebook profile you’ve built for yourself is another one, a shadow profile, built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users. Contact information you’ve never given the network gets associated with your account, making it easier for Facebook to more completely map your social connections.
Not sure if this is incredibly creepy, just the way things are heading or both.
Bitty Data Logger is an application which can capture and chart data from a BBC micro:bit’s internal accelerometer, magnetometer and temperature sensors. It’s available for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets and for Chromebook as well. Data is, of course, transmitted from the micro:bit to your smartphone over Bluetooth so you can be some distance away from the micro:bit and…. whatever you have connected to it.
I had a quick test with an earlier version. Lots of possibilities for the classroom, wonder when I’ll get it fitted in.
one of the traditional roles of branded content is that it is a trusted source. Whether it’s Peppa Pig on children’s TV or a Disney movie, whatever one’s feelings about the industrial model of entertainment production, they are carefully produced and monitored so that kids are essentially safe watching them, and can be trusted as such. This no longer applies when brand and content are disassociated by the platform, and so known and trusted content provides a seamless gateway to unverified and potentially harmful content.
There seems to be a myriad of weird videos, automatically or semi-automatically created, earning money. Google have now said they will restrict videos that are flagged: YouTube to restrict ‘disturbing’ children’s videos, if flagged – BBC News. It seems unlikely that will deal with the problem.
Featured image, a bit of processing slit-scanning strangness, guess the source.
Grist from the pinboard.
Gardner and Davis suggested that the pre-packaged resources (no matter how vast) made available to young people through the Internet is limiting exercise of the imagination because (as Marvel has shown again and again) it is easier to repackage an existing idea than come up with a new one
A lot of these projects involve connecting the micro:bit to other bits and pieces; such as buzzers, or LEDs. However, we start off with a really simple project which just uses the micro:bit on its own
We tried to inspire reflection, but it often happened separate from learning. At the end of the semester, we’d ask students about their strengths and weaknesses, and what they could do differently next semester. They would write down a few ideas, but were never asked to come back to them. It became an activity that yielded little impact.
This tool helps you check what data-protecting measures a site has taken to help you exercise control over your privacy. Read more.
One of the many links from the next one.
We’re quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it.
Lots of information and links clearly spelt out. Tempted to quote all of it, but just one more.
Pay for services and content that you like, if you are able. If you like reading The Guardian, for example, consider subscribing. If your favourite YouTube channel is on Patreon, consider pledging a small amount per video. If you like services like Pinboard.in that charge in return for a useful service, buy it. There’s mutual respect when both the user and the service provider know what basic service they are buying/selling.