Tag Archives: Micro

TeachMeet20⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Four men sitting in a pub, smiling and talking, with pints of dark beer on two small tables. Bob, Ewan, Me & Will at the Jolly Judge.

I was tagged by Mags Amond for

tagging you next for a #TeachMeet20 looking back / looking forward post @johnjohnston

TeachMeet, a meet up for teachers, self organised and designed to keep it grassroots. The Wikipedia page is not too far from the mark. Started 20 years ago!

So I looked back. I’ve 38 posts tagged teachmeet here. But if I search for TeachMeet I find 124 posts. Searching my Twitter export finds over 300 matches. So TeachMeet has been on my mind over the years.

What I was thinking about 10 years ago: TeachMeet10: time for a TM-Reboot in Scotland?

For me TeachMeet is part of one of the most exciting periods in my teaching life. My already well developed obsession with using technology in teaching had exploded with the internet, blogging, podcasting & RSS. Twitter was on the horizon. As a class teacher I was getting to go to conferences!

Ewan MacIntosh was the main instigator of the 2006 ScotEduBlogger meet-up. After the second day of e-live conference we were all heading off to the Jolly Judge, a pub with WiFi! So excited.

The development of TeachMeet has been well covered. Mags has done an amazing job, for example.

Looking Back

I started writing some notes about TeachMeet’s past, but didn’t get past some bullet points, I am going to post them otherwise this post will take the rest of the year. Views very much IMO.

  • I remember preparing like crazy for the first ‘real’ teachmeet. My name didn’t come out of the hat1. I did speak at the second SLF one. On first and speeding through my presentation in jig time.
  • I recall another SLF one when Ewan stopped a speaker for being commercial.
  • I loved the random picker idea and the no PowerPoint rule.
  • I remember a blog post or comment by Robert Jones to the effect that the main beneficiaries was on the speakers. I certainly learnt a lot by presenting, but also in helping organise TMs.
  • I remember not liking the idea of keynote speakers, when I read of the BETT events.
  • I never really liked the freebies from sponsors. I did enjoy the free beer and snacks.
  • In retrospect I think the TM I regret missing most was an outdoor one somewhere in central Scotland with, as I dimly recall, tents & camping.
  • I met so many good people. The initial jolly judgers, the second round, small TeachMeets that spread over Scotland, and the online folk. All were full of positivity, generosity & kindness. Some passed by, some I’ve followed for years.
  • The positivity. This may have been the main benefit to me. It felt like it was from the infantry not the officers.
  • Recently I read of the Twinkl TeachMeet: hated it, asked them to change the name, got nowhere.

Looking forward

TeachMeet withered somewhat in Scotland, I am not sure why. Maybe things bubble up for a while, serve their purpose and then don’t anymore. Different times might need different solutions. Pedagoo felt to me like an evolution of TeachMeet to some extent. Its domain has gone now. My fingers are far from the pulse of Scottish education.

I am probably not the best person to ask. When the name was being discussed I held fast to Scots EduBloggers Meetup. That lacked a bit of inclusivity and was somewhat shortsighted 😃.

To me TeachMeet felt as if it was in the same category as Blogging, Creative Commons, RSS, Open Source and other things that promoted freedom and sharing. Online interactions seem a lot less innocent now than they did then. I still believe these things are important.

Lots of educational CPD now seems to be in Teams or Zoom, this misses the serendipity involved in a face to face meeting and the built in talk to your neighbour TM principle.

Other, to me, important aspects of TeachMeet which should be carried forward include: a relaxed social feeling; the flattening of hierarchy; the centrality of classroom practice and fun. We could do without freebies; involvement of leaders in setting the agenda, although they are more than welcome to share their classroom experience and technology and services without classroom practice.

The most important for me would be the selection of speakers at random, hopefully with more speakers than spaces. TeachMeeters should be willing to go along to listen to others and open the opportunity to share if it arises. Not being guaranteed a spot might lead to more spontaneous presentations, serendipity and perhaps a reason to organise the next one.

Given I’ve now retired from teaching, I do not suppose I’ll be at another TeachMeet I will alway be interested in seeing how it goes.

Postscript teachmeet.scot

I have the teachmeet.scot domain. I don’t want to keep paying for it or hosting the inactive site2. I’d love to give it to someone else who would care for it in the right way.

  1. Probably just as well I was going to talk about RSS, possible not the most interesting subject to class teachers. ↩︎
  2. The site was set up to allow folk to ask for an account and then post events. At one point I hoped that folk could be encouraged to post reports or link to reports of events to create a resource of sorts. ↩︎

wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display 2025-03-24 15:28:18⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Likes “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI by Molly White.

Irresponsible AI companies are already imposing huge loads on Wikimedia infrastructure, which is costly both from a pure bandwidth perspective, but also because it requires dedicated engineers to maintain and improve systems to handle the massive automated traffic. And AI companies that do not attribute their responses or otherwise provide any pointers back to Wikipedia prevent users from knowing where that material came from, and do not encourage those users to go visit Wikipedia, where they might then sign up as an editor, or donate after seeing a request for support. (This is most AI companies, by the way. Many AI “visionaries” seem perfectly content to promise that artificial superintelligence is just around the corner, but claim that attribution is somehow a permanently unsolvable problem.)

A good post to read or listen to at the beginning of  Scottish AI in Schools week . The article does not want the stable door closed.

Some AI Links & Things to Think About⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

A montage of 4 webpage screenshots.

Bookmarked for future reading. AI in education is becoming increasingly confusing.

Education Scotland are running a week #ScotAI25: Scottish AI in Schools 2025 with live lessons for pupils & some cpd for staff. I might try to make some of those.

  • This week I’ve used:
    ChatGPT to make some questions up about a passage of text for an individual in my class; Write an example text about levers; create a formula for a number spreadsheet and create a regular expression.
  • Claude to make a fractions matching game and a trivia quiz.
  • I am occasionally using lovable.dev to play around making an alternative way of posting to WordPress.

I might have used ChatGPT a couple more times in school. Although it is accessible the login options didn’t seem to be so I’ve no history to check.

Quite a few teachers I know use it in some of these ways in a, like me, fairly causal way. This is a lot easier than thinking about any ethical and moral implication.

Listened to: Learning Conversations Artificial Intelligence with Ollie Bray⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Listened to: Learning Conversations Artificial Intelligence with Ollie Bray | Education Scotland podcast

This is the first Education Scotland podcast episode I’ve listened to. Solid food for thought. I’ve not developed any really solid ideas around AI in education but this helped me think of some questions. Ollie compared the uptake and development to AI to other technologies:

So the take up rate of generative AI, like ChatGTP, has been far quicker than people signing up to Facebook, you know, people adopting the internet, people getting a television, people getting radio, etc.

There was discussion of some ways that AI is already being used in schools including what Ollie described as lots of schools doing really, really good work around the ethics of AI.

I wonder what aspects of ethics are being discussed? The one I’ve thought of most is already out of the stable. All the material scraped by AI before we got a chance to choose. I’m not particularly worried about anything I put online being gobbled up by AI, but I imagine it would be more of concern for artists and writers who earn a living from content?

I think we also need to consider the ethics of all application & services we use in education. Especially when application make educational design decisions or have unethical behaviour1.

An interesting point was around developing AI to recreate traditional methods of education, but arguably in more efficient way. Ollie thinks that is probably missing how do we use the technology to do things that were unimaginable before?

I’ve read a bit about using AI in schools for report writing, analysing pupil data and the like and seen a few educational AI startups offering that sort of service. Most of the teachers I’ve talked to, like myself, have used it in a very basic way, cutting down some time in making a quiz or other classroom resources. We are just using ChartGPT, Copilot. etc in as fairly simplistic way.

The podcast talked about the need to update the Scottish Government’s technologies for learning strategy mentioning that it would take 10 years to bring this to publication. I can see a bit of a mismatch with the speed that technology is developing, especially AI. Can we plan that far ahead?

I used the AI application Aiko to generate the transcript to get the quotes.

  1. Thinking about X/Twitter, see Can democracy survive now the world’s richest man has it in his sights? | George Monbiot | The Guardian should we be using X with learners or at all given Mr Musk’s reinstatement of horrors & obliging censorship of government critics? ↩︎

wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display 2024-05-04 09:58:05⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

AI in action

In the vast sea of educational blogs, The Learning Hub shines as a beacon of insightful content and valuable resources. With a dedication to excellence and a passion for learning, this blog has become a go-to destination for educators, students, and parents alike.

 

This was posted in response to a post on the Glow Blog help: Glow Blogs Start of Session FAQ 2022.

I’ve been generating a bit of text for example sites recently and this text has the same smell I get from ChatGPT and co-pilot.

wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display 2024-04-06 09:28:29⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Read OER24: Gathering Courage by Lorna M. CampbellLorna M. Campbell
How does open education practice sit alongside generative AI? There are some similarities in terms of ethos; GAI repurposes, reuses, and remixes resources, but in a really selfish way.

Every section in Lorna’s post is interesting but this popped right out at me.

micro:bit iOS app update⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

I really like the iOS micro:bit app as do my class. I was intrigued by the data feature when it came out but had not used it. Delighted to see this:

Fetch MY_DATA

Selecting this option lets you retrieve data that has been logged during a data-logging session with the micro:bit.  This is only available with Version 2 micro:bits.

iOS App – Summary of changes in August 2023 update : Help & Support

iMac-less in the classroom⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

I’ve been lucky, imo, to have been using an old 27 inch iMac as my computer in school since I started 8 years ago. Despite its age it has been a wonderful machine for me. Returning to my classroom last week I found it will no longer start up at all. No response to the power button. This was my Mac when I worked at the Education Computer Centre before being redeployed to the classroom.

Apart from my familiarity with Macs (going back to system 7) a Mac fits really well with a class all using iPads. The ease of sharing via Airdrop is probably the biggest advantage. It’s simplicity and the way it doesn’t depend on the cloud make it useable even if our internet connection is slow or down. I can quickly collect the pupils work via AirDrop and manipulate (print, combine, resize, assess, organise etc) it on my Mac.

I also prefer using the Apple productivity apps on an iPad but like creating & editing them even more on a Mac.

Large screen computers are rare in primary schools but I have been spoiled. We mostly use quite small laptops. I find these quite difficult to work on. If I use a trackpad for more than a few minutes I get pain in my shoulder and a couple of fingers go numb.

As we now only buy Windows machines in my L.A., I have access to a Windows laptop. However, my old fingers are Apple-trained. I am currently using a rather old MacBook Pro. I have the keyboard from the iMac plugged in, along with the mouse. I think I might just buy a cheap screen and add that as well. I can bring it home and make my Mac mini a dual-screen setup when the laptop follows the iMac.

Having used the MacBook for 4 days I realise how many think I’d added to the iMac (and have at home) that make my life easier. I am going to have to spend some time adjusting the MacBook to my habits. The ones l’ve particularly missed so far are:

  • FastScripts and the AppleScripts I run from it. These are pretty simple: resizing images, collections URLS from tabs to a list and the like.
  • HyperKey, that lets me run said scripts from the keyboard.
  • Various shell scripts, mostly for montage and combining images.
  • Alfred, as a launcher and clipboard manager.
  • I’d miss Rectangle if my screen was bigger.

All small things that I use without thinking and make my life simpler.

This week has certainly made me appreciate the technology I’ve been taking for granted. I also need to remind myself that in my time of teaching, I’ve gone from a couple of computers in a whole school without a network, to 1-2-1 iPads in my class today. Can’t complain!

evidence-led innovation⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Ollie Brae’s tweet, leads to Game Over for Maths A-level — Conrad Wolfram

The combination of ChatGPT with its Wolfram plug-in just scored 96% in a UK Maths A-level paper, the exam taken at the end of school, as a crucial metric for university entrance. (That compares to 43% for ChatGPT alone).

Wrong conclusion: ban it. Right conclusion: change what humans are learning so they step up a level, and don’t compete with what AIs do well.

Wolfram goes on to explain that an overhaul of the math curriculum is long overdue, and quotes himself from 3 years ago:

Today’s ecosystem of education doesn’t easily support such subject change. From assessments tied to today’s subjects, to too short a time horizon, to evidence-led innovation rather than innovation-led evidence, there’s everything to prevent core subject change and seemingly nothing to promote it. Except, eventually, after much disarray, cold, hard failure.

My hi-light. Seeing “evidence-led innovation” as part of the problem was interesting.