A choice few from Pinboard: bookmarks for johnjohnston

• School Report – Young farmers win award for designing cattle management app Louise Jones point to this one on Radio #EDUtalk when she was talking about some of the emerging issues in Internet Safety and Responsible Use and link to Digital Literacy Skills, future employers expectations.
• Apple updates GarageBand for Mac with MP3 export option, improved accessibility I was very disappointed when they dropped mp3 support, glad it is back.
• Fund Glew Certificates and Hosting Charlie Love is asking for a little help with Glew:
  

  In May 2012, I launched Glew, a proof of concept platform for education, linking a wide range of tools for learning to a single sign-on authentication.  Glew brings together Google Apps for Education, WordPress, Mahara, LimeSurvery, MediaWiki and Moodle into a single platform for education.

  Well worth supporting.

• LittleBits’ Ayah Bdeir: Making Hardware As Hackable As Code – ReadWrite This is a fascinating concept, making electronic components easy to snap together and an equally fascinating backstory.

Lifted from my Pinboard

• Had a busy week with EDUtalk, spent Saturday at the ACTS conference recording, nearly finished posting the audio with the actsconf2014 tag. We had a great show on Wednesday with Morag Watson and Rosa Murray talking about Learning for Sustainability.
  The final Show of the week was rather unusual #ed473 ‘Considering networked communications for educators’ Bonnie Stewart had her class broadcast their final presentation, to an audience on Radio Edutalk, twitter & TitanPad. Great buzz around the show, links to the gather tweets and titanpad conversation on the post.
• Theo tweeted me the link to Vector Magic Precision Bitmap To Vector Conversion Online I hope to play with it soon.
• Open Education Webinar | JISC RSC-Scotland Newsfeed Want to find out more about open education? Join us for a webinar to find out about open education and initiatives taking place in Scotland. Wednesday, 2nd April (12.00-12.45)
• I was chatting to @digitalkatie with Ian Stuart this week about PechaKucha and mentioned Alan Levin’s PechaFlickr, now updated:
• pechaflickr Now Equipped with Super Powers of Photo Credit – CogDogBlog
• Alan’s ds106 Assignment Bank is getting ready, Inside and Outside the ds106 Assignment Bank Theme I’d love to give this a spin for creating some sort of online course sometime.
• If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel – A tediously accurate map of the solar system Quite amazing, be a good resource when covering the Solar system in class. How insignificant are we!
• Overview of the SharePoint 2013 page model Useful reference for understanding how themes, materpages and templates work in the Office 365. Good for Glow
• I revisited the earliest version of the School website I created on the Internet Archive: Sandaig Primary School, somewhat simpler than glow
• TLDRLegal – Software Licenses Explained in Plain English looks a useful resource for talking about Creative commons and other copyright related issues.

Photo: Organic Networks – New Urban?, Creative Commons — CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The latest crop from from my Pinboard link farm.

• BBC News – Linking to free web content is legal, says EU Court
  

  Websites can link to freely available content without the permission of the copyright holder, the European Court of Justice says.

  PHEW!

• TannerVision: Is Personalized Learning a Fad?
  

  I guess what I’m saying is that we need to start by making a difference in the lives of a few learners by being the caring person who provides a rich environment for them.

  From one of my favourite blogs, one of many thoughtful posts. (The answer given to the question is No.)

• Sonic Pi
  

  Sonic Pi is an open source programming environment designed to explore and teach programming concepts through the process of creating new sounds. Sonic Pi comes with an associated scheme of work which emphasises the importance of creativity in the learning process and gives users the control to turn their sonic ideas into reality.

  Having little understanding of music I think this would be as opaque as minecraft to me, but looks like an interesting way into computer science, the scheme of work is for KS3. I’ve got a PI of my own, but never been in a position to work/play with pupils using one (or a few).

• One sentence on Wikipedia: a microcosm of information literacy | Jisc Wikimedian Ambassador
  

  Role-playing as Wikipedia editors, learners could answer 1) how they would rewrite the text to be balanced, factual and non-promotional

  Really interesting looking blog, this one post gives a lot of food for some lessons on (internet) literacy.

Some links harvested from my Pinboard:

• Computer Science Unplugged | looks interesting:
  

  CS Unplugged is a collection of free learning activities that teach Computer Science through engaging games and puzzles that use cards, string, crayons and lots of running around.

  The activities introduce students to underlying concepts such as binary numbers, algorithms and data compression, separated from the distractions and technical details we usually see with computers.

  I’ve been wondering about the push to teach pupils to code, but this sounds like it might be fun for a lot of pupils.

• The Little Girl from the 1981 LEGO Ad is All Grown Up, and She’s Got Something to SayI was talking about the original advert at work the other day and then this came up on twitter via @IanStuart66.
• North Berwick Nursery School – Identifying the mouse, I pointed to this post on twitter this week, it is my favourite blog post. Two photos and three sentences that tell you a lot!
• ransomify! is a bookmarklet to make webpages look like ransom notes (albeit ones torn from pastel papers). I can’t think of anything useful to do with this at all (except studying javascript) but it is fun.
• Digital creativity in Scotland | Nesta
  

  This year Nesta has been funded by the Scottish Government to increase the number of young people using digital creativity in schools. We feel the main way to do this is to support teachers to gain the skills and confidence they need to run digital creativity projects in their class.

  I like the idea of digital creativity more than just focusing on teaching all pupils to code.

• TeachMeet / TeachMeet Edinburgh Innovative Learning 2014THis looks like a great teachmeet, I’ll not make it but would have liked to:
  

  As part of Edinburgh University’s Innovative Learning Week 2014, we hope this TeachMeet will inspire practitioners and reinforce the important partnerships in teacher education and development. There is always something new to learn, whether you are well into your career or just starting out. Come and share a great idea!

• makingmakars | Scottish Poetry Library’s sharing space for teachersWith all the talk about coding and digital creating, good to see some work making ideas.
• Create 3D gifs by adding 2 lines.  Archive.org pointed to by @jimgroom, on bavatumblr, example gifs that do just this. Visually fascinating.

Some things I’ve Pinboard: bookmarked over the last week.

• Twitter / hughtheteacher: Love this questioning graphic …

  Was well retweeted:

  Love this questioning graphic created by @michellek107 Perfect inquiry helper 2 #geniushour #BellLetsTalk #sd36learn pic.twitter.com/nwGYVSM4jf

  — Hugh McDonald (@hughtheteacher) January 29, 2014

• Is the British education system designed to polarise people? | Education | The Guardian
  

  Young people need to learn to control the richest 1% who dominate Britain, argues Professor Danny Dorling

• Radio #EDUtalk 6-2-2014 David Gilmour: Edubuzz | EDUtalk

  We had a great chat on Edutalk this week with David, mostly about edubuzz, there are some really great nuggets of wisdom about introducing ict and the web into education.

• I was at TeachMeet West Dumbartonshire/ this week and picked up lots of good ideas and a couple of new blogs to add to ScotEdublogs: Learning is the Work | Sharing our learning and Higher English Online | Critical Essay, Close Reading, Folio & NAB advice.

• Last week I linked to the Gif Party at Late at Tate Britain February 2014 (and submitted a few gifs ) I got a tweet linking to a post on the Liberate Tate site: We finally got invited to a party at Tate! Subverting the party with some gifs.

• 

  Typing about gif, Theo tweeted me a link to a great youtube video:
  Man with a Movie Camera (Alloy Orchestra) 1929 – Человек с киноаппаратом – YouTube, ideal gif material (I’ve already pulled a few easy ones). This is a movie by Dziga Vertov.

  In the 2012 Sight and Sound poll, the critics voted Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) the 8th best film ever made.

  but I had never heard of it. It has lead down a rabbit hole of links, starting with the wikipedia one, and endinf, so far, at UbuWeb Sound – Dziga Vertov:

  Enthusiasm! The Dombass Symphony (1930) is possibly Dziga Vertov’s most revolutionary achievement: a symphony of abstract industrial noise for which a specially designed giant mobile recording system was constructed (it weighed over a ton) in order to capture the din of mines, furnaces and factories. For Vertov, the introduction of sound film didn’t mean talkies, but the opportunity to collage, montage and splice together constructions of pure environmental noise.

  I love his idea of a mobile recording system (my emphasis), mine weighs about 4 ounces

• JellyCam — Stop-motion maker is free, only exports to flv videos at the moment. Might be a nice way to start stop-motion in the class, runs on windows and mac, but needs the adobe air system. Nice and simple, but you can do some basic editing and add mp3 audio.

Image: Double page from ‘Shinki ipputsu’ Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 2.0 from Wellcome Images.

Notes from the bookmarks I’ve made this week.

There is an awful lot of giffing going on.

I noticed:

• 1840s GIF party: call for submissions at the Tate (yep the Tate!)
• The GIF the Portrait Project
• along with Jim Groom’s The Academic GIF.

I’ve joined in the 1840s Gif party

#walkmyworld is an interesting hash tag

Over the next ten weeks, we would like you all to share (once a week) with us a “walk” in your “world.” There really are no rules to this challenge. The only real “rule” to this challenge is that we ask that you share this publicly on Twitter, and include the hashtag (#walkmyworld) in your post.

from: The #WALKMYWORLD Project you can join in or follow the activity:
Twitter / Search – #walkmyworld

Here is my first effort on instagram.

Some Heavy Hitters

• School Leadership – A Scottish Perspective George Gilchrist’s blog was added to the ScotEduBlogs aggregation
• David Cameron talked on Radio EDUtalk about What do we need to do to get real improvement in Scottish Education? While we had the @realdcameron rather than that prime minister with the same name:
• Inside Learning had Mike Russell which I look forward to listening to on the train.

It is getting more common

For institutions to release images under Creative commons licenses. This week I bookmarked Thousands of years of visual culture made free through Wellcome Images

We are delighted to announce that over 100,000 high resolution images including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements are now freely available through Wellcome Images.

Not the easiest site to use, no embed codes for example, but another welcome(sorry) addition to a growing set of wonderful creative commons resources.