Received an email today stating that there would be some disruption in the office due to some upgrades occuring. As I am working at home this will not be a problem. However, it highlights something that it feels as if there are some aspects of society that see such crises as an opportunity. I guess it comes down to perspective. What is a little disruption in a time of transformation, something epitomised with the repainting of the famous Abbey Road crossing.
Month: March 2020
Darra Goldstein combines a scholar’s knowledge of history and literature with a cook’s interest in recipes and ingredients. She had already written extensively on food across the vast Soviet empire, but more recently turned her attention to a search for what she calls “the true heart of Russian food“. She found it on the Kola Peninsula, a wild and forbidding part of Russia right at the top of Scandinavia. Our conversation, prompted by her new book, went further afield to include glimpses of food revivals and innovation in Russia today.
Interesting as always Jeremy.
We need to go slowly. We need to ask a lot of questions. We need to think about expectations at the provincial, district, school, and home levels.
Ultimately, then, we’re going to need a whole new politics and social contract after the pandemic. I sincerely hope we manage to grasp the nettle and do something radically different. I’m not sure how we’ll all survive if the rich, once again, come out of all this even richer than before.
Well put Doug. Not sure what tomorrow is to bring. I liked how Seth Godin puts it too:
My generation was the dominant voice for sixty years. A voice that worried about the next 24 hours, not the next 24 years. That’s about to shift, regardless of what year you were born.
Every day as the scale of this present coal-black cloud grows across the globe, it’s harder to spot a silver lining, but perhaps in this country it might be this; that in a time of crisis we formed a national decision-making body roughly half of which came from each of our two major parties, and decisions were made that were well outside the orthodox political comfort zone of the people making them, and that some loud voices shut up for a minute, in recognition that the situation was bigger than their own need never to give an inch.
Annabel Crabb reflects on the ability in times of crisis for people and politics to get things done.
Getting private hospitals to work hand in glove with the public system?
Asking vast chunks of the schools sector to educate children remotely? Publishing newspapers from empty newsrooms? Whole companies working from home? Turning over hotels to homeless people?
All of this would have seemed impossible just weeks ago.
The LIKE string operator in Google Sheets Query is useful for complex comparisons. It helps you use two wildcards in Google Sheets Query.
I know that it is possible to use wildcards in VLOOKUPS, however I was wondering for a means of incorporating a wildcard into a QUERY. Ideally, I wanted to replace a letter with a wildcard, but I did find a couple of posts discussing the use of LIKE to incorporate
% or _ options. For example:
=query(A2:A,"Select A where A like 'A%'")
As well as MATCH to utilise REGEX:
=query(A1:B, "Select * where B matches 'India|Russia' ")
Rather than an OR statement:
=query(A1:B, "Select * where B = 'India' or B = 'Russia'")
Using REGEX also allows you to match a substring anywhere in a string:
=query(A1:B, "Select * where B matches '.*India.*' ")
Although I was still stuck with my initial problem (might need to explore the use of an IF statement), however I did pick up a few more possibilities.
A great video that demonstrates the power of cleaning your hands to stop the spread of the coronavirus
Decades of research about online or distance education are unable to give a definitive answer to the question: does it work? The best answer one can get is “it depends.” It depends on how the program is delivered; it depends on what outcomes are measured; it depends on whose interests is considered; it depends on the content, the context, the design, the delivery, the technology, the instructor, the student, and many other factors.
- release work often
- reference your own thinking
- rework the same ideas again and again
This document is intended to not only give you some tips on hosting beautiful interactive and playful online events, but also to help you set yourself up for success with the right preferences so this doesn’t happen to you!
via Doug Belshaw
Now is the time to get meta with parents, students, and teachers about learning. And we can do it in the service of learning about learning. Whether through survey or live Zoom discussions or email or whatever else, right now is when we need to be asking these questions and engaging in these conversations:
- When is your child most engaged with their online school experience? Why? What drives that engagement?
- When is your child bored or disengaged? Why?
- When do your children feel joy in learning? What circumstances lead to that?
- What are you learning about your children during this experience? How does that learning happen?
- How are your children’s learning skills improving during this time? What’s changing about them as learners?
I’m sure there are others, and we can vary them for the audience, but you get the idea. We can collect and share these answers at the appropriate time as a way of sparking a larger conversation about what learning really is, what aspects of school really aren’t working, and how we can bring more joy and love of learning to “real” school moving forward. And it would be a spark built on our personal, collective experience as qualitative researchers asking relevant, important questions about our kids.
The something you know is the password, and yes it’s still a good idea to have a strong password, something with enough length and complexity that is hard to guess but easy to remember. But it’s not enough. It’s just one factor.
The second factor is something you have, or something you physically carry with you, such as a phone or touch key. Unless the hacker or foreign power actually has your phone, they can’t access your data, even if they know your password. Just like the two keys for the front door, they need both your password AND your phone at the same time. If they have both those things, you may just have bigger problems to deal with.
We’ve been talking for a while about offering a “teams” plan on Micro.blog that would be great for small businesses, schools, and family blogs. With more people working from home, we’re already adding podcast hosting to all plans through April, and we think that podcasts and short videos could be valuable tools for teachers who are adapting their lesson plans for online classes.
This is a great initiative Manton.
Just a quick question for the future, what would happen to accounts at the end of the 6-months? Or at the end of the month of free podcasting? Do those posts and podcasts get hidden in the backend? Just wondering.
People seem to be obsessed with hoarding loo roll – maybe they’d like some films about it. Replace one word in a film title with “toilet paper”, “loo roll” or wh…
Avengers: Toilet Paper War. Having acquired many of the staples, including flour, pasta, rice, tinned tomatoes, paracetamol and hand wash, Thanos goes out in search for the one item that no-one can find … toilet paper.
Chris Lehmann (Practical Theory)“What is the least bad thing we can do?” is, in some ways, a darker version of “What is the worst consequence of my best idea?” which is a concept we’ve used at SLA for years to make sure we stayed humble and never fell in love with an idea without examining unintended consequences or questioning who is privileged by it or what will go wrong, even if the overall concept goes right. “Least bad” is a recognition that whatever we do right now to move schools into an online version of themselves, it’s not the way we should do it under any normal circumstances, and what it becomes, then, is perhaps our own educational Hippocratic oath to remind us that so much of what we’re about to do is triage.
Chris Lehmann suggests that in the time of coronavirus our focus should be on the ‘least bad decision’. This includes teaching the child, remembering that online learning is not automatic, simplify assignments, rethinking assessments, doubling up on feedback and remembering the purpose of it all.
Civic engagement and activism in normal times has benefits, but in these times of coronavirus and social distancing-isolation, the benefits are amplified as such engagement can move young people from feelings of helplessness to feelings of empowerment.
Can you please let me know where you found this post?
I usually read your posts via RSS (
https://daily-ink.davidtruss.com/feed/) in Inoreader. I added this feed to my blog roll which I am then able to subscribe to.A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to be asked to run an enrichment program for year 7 students at NBSC, Manly Campus. The program involved leading students through a week of inquiry based le…
Thank you for sharing Lee, I love the different ways in which you utilise Minecraft for different purposes.
The question right now for educators should not be “what technology do I need to move my class online?” The question should be “what am I doing to support my students (and my colleagues and my family)?” Start there — not with tech but with compassion.
With so much discussion of the pivot to technology and learning at home, Audrey Watters suggests that our focus needs to be on care and compassion.
Here are five ways teachers, or other course or project leaders, can keep human connections and meaningful interactions in focus during the move online. As an educator and researcher who works with faculty and students to effectively integrate technology for learning, I’ve also used these guidelines in day-to-day decisions as our university moves to remote delivery.
Erika E. Smith shares five ways teachers can keep human connections and meaningful interactions in focus during the move online:
- Simplify and be flexible
- Don’t assume people have reliable technology access or understand particular digital platforms
- Look for ways to build an online community
- Don’t be afraid to crowdsource ideas
- Keep the big picture in mindđź“‘