Spaces

January 22nd, 2010

Edinburgh film theatre welcomes bloggers

Electricity costs less than 10p per kilowatt hour. You can charge quite a few laptop batteries for that, so I assume the notice was to do with health and safety, or encouraging people to move after their latte.

A small corner in a city

I see a lot of small odds and ends of space like this around the cities I visit. How do we use them to increase (positive) interactions, break down barriers, and increase social cohesion (or confront and resolve the differences)?

Ninjawords dictionary

January 17th, 2010

ninjawords dictionary no adverts and fast

The ninjawords on-line dictionary is fast and carries no adverts. Definitions are short and many have usage examples provided. There is an iPhone app, and the page is mobile friendly. I’m putting it on the front of our Moodle.

Definitions contain hyper links to other defined words so you can play the game where you look up a word then look up the words used to define the word…

Post to twitter from command line

January 17th, 2010

Works in the Mac OS terminal, and on Linux if you install curl.

#! /bin/sh
curl  --basic --user "username:password"
        --data-ascii "status=`echo $@|tr ' ' '+'`"
          "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml" > /dev/null

Update of something I found from 2007, when twitter was using a different API by the look of it.

The curl command line should all be on one line, no line breaks. I’ve had to add line breaks here so the line does not disappear into the sidebar. The redirect to /dev/null simply suppresses the 20 lines of xml that are returned by twitter when the twit is received.

If I used the short version of the—user option to curl, and if I put up with the xml output, I could have a script that posts to twitter that I could tweet.

Workshop number questions

January 12th, 2010

Birmingham University hydrogen powered canal boat on frozen canal

Download a one side worksheet with some workshop questions on number. Some symbolic questions (equivalent fractions, multiplication) and some word problems (VAT increase).

The main phase of the lesson was about probability. Packs of playing cards, coin tossing, and a discussion about smoking cessation, the National Health, and individual behaviour versus averages. Good stuff, and I’ll post an evaluation here in a bit.

January

January 4th, 2010

January 2010 wallpaper 1280 by 1024

Click for a 1280 by 1024 desktop wallpaper image with a January 2010 calendar on it.

Data module mind map

January 4th, 2010

screen grab showing mind map in free mind

I’m using maps to plan lessons more and more. This one is getting a bit out of hand with the links between topics!

More workshop questions

January 3rd, 2010

Download a pdf file with 20 questions about number topics.

This will get people back into the groove after the holiday. I allow about 30 minutes for this kind of worksheet. I have back up activities for the more confident students.