After blogging somewhat infrequently for the last 5 years, 3.5 of which have been here on this self-hosted WordPress blog I feel like it’s time for a change.  The last time I changed this blog theme I tried to make it a little easier to use and more like a Tumblr blog.  However reading Will Richardson’s thoughts about blogging and his move to Tumblr I was inspired to give it a go.

It’s rare that I get the chance to write long thought posts any more, but I often have smaller snippets to share. I’m incredibly busy since becoming Assistant Head and I’m looking for something that sits somewhere between the limitation of 140 characters on Twitter and the time it takes to write a post on here.  Tumblr seems to fit the bill nicely and is more than capable of handling extended writing, whilst being extremely simple to post to.

I already owned www.danielstucke.com, I think it’s important to own your own space on the Web these days, it used to redirect to this blog but now has my Tumblr on it. I also feel like it’s time I wrote under my whole name. 5 years ago I registered most things online under ‘mrstucke’, feeling like I’d rather it was harder for students to identify me. Since then I’ve gained so much professionally from writing and sharing online that I’d rather write under my full name.

So for the time-being at least I’ll be writing over on www.danielstucke.com and not here.  I won’t cross-post everything, as I had experimented with, as that just clutters the conversation.  I’m also using www.ifttt.com to work with that content, bookmarking and saving to Evernote each post that I write.

I can be quite fickle so may well switch back again at some point, if not I hope I’ll see you there!

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1. From my tumblr: Time to switch to tumblr? Time to switch to tumblr?: Will has inspired me to...
2. From my tumblr: Why Not Tumblr Why Not Tumblr: And as a counter-argument, Gina Trapani makes...
3. From my tumblr: Another High School Opts for iPad 1-2-1 Another High School Opts for iPad 1-2-1: TUAW: After collaborating...

A ‘Technical Baccalaureate’?:

The education charity Edge, which promotes technical and practical learning and of which Adonis is a trustee, is working closely with the Baker Dearing Educational Trust to come up with such a qualification. Under the plans, seen exclusively by Education Guardian, pupils aged 14 to 16 would spend 60% of their time studying for GCSEs in English, maths, science and another subject. The rest of their time would be taken up with a technical qualification, such as an engineering diploma or a construction course. They would also be expected to study a language, but not necessarily to GCSE standard.

This would be known as a Professional Technical Baccalaureate, and the organisations hope it would be used as a measurement in school league tables, as the Ebacc is now, and offered in all schools.

Whilst I’m no fan of the English Baccaluareate do we need yet another measure that the majority of people aren’t going to understand?

What exactly was wrong with relying on straight up single exam results any way?

on tumblr: http://danielstucke.com/post/6765794030

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Why Not Tumblr:

And as a counter-argument, Gina Trapani makes a case against tumblr. Export and ownership is important in this throw-away world that we live in.

on tumblr: http://danielstucke.com/post/6749133333

Related posts:

1. From my tumblr: Time to switch to tumblr? Time to switch to tumblr?: Will has inspired me to...
2. From my tumblr: Another High School Opts for iPad 1-2-1 Another High School Opts for iPad 1-2-1: TUAW: After collaborating...

Time to switch to tumblr?:

Will has inspired me to take a fresh look at tumblr and see if it might be better suited for my blogging needs than my self hosted WordPress at www.mrstucke.com. I do feel something inbetween a blog and twitter might suit me better as work gets busier and busier.

on tumblr: http://danielstucke.com/post/6732980806

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1. From my tumblr: Another High School Opts for iPad 1-2-1 Another High School Opts for iPad 1-2-1: TUAW: After collaborating...

Another High School Opts for iPad 1-2-1:

TUAW:

After collaborating with Apple for a year, Northern Ireland’s Wallace High School has launched the country’s largest 1:1 iPad initiative. The school’s principal, Deborah O’Hare, said in a press release that she and her staff had been letting students bring portable devices into the classroom..

I will be speaking to Apple and the eLearning Foundation next week to ascertain whether this is a realistic possibility at our school.  I wrote about this at length on mrstucke.com and since then have decided it may be a more realistic possibility than I thought. An exciting few days with our senior leadership team planning for a future with creativity and independent learners at the heart of our school only makes me keener to make this work!

on tumblr: http://danielstucke.tumblr.com/post/6836238072

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I’ve been playing around with a fascinating website called If This Then That http://ifttt.com.  Think of it as virtual gaffer tape that automatically ties all of your online activities together in a myriad of possible ways.

When you sign up you then need to connect it to as many of your online presences as you choose, there’s an impressive selection of so-called ‘channels’:

ifttt 'channels'

Once you’ve done that you enter the beautifully designed ‘creation’ tool and design you ‘task’, where in essence you choose ‘if this then that’. Choosing ‘if this’ happens in one of your ‘channels’ ‘then that’ automatically happens in another channel.

Rather than twitter on here are some tasks I’ve been experimenting with:

Those are some obvious uses but you can be much more creative with some of the other channels on offer.  The GMail channel allows emails to be sent from your account based upon one of the triggers, although my test of this using the Weather channel to email Mrs Stucke every time it rains in Manchester hasn’t amused her on this wet May weekend!!

You are currently allowed 10 tasks in total – the service is in limited free beta at the moment so I wouldn’t be surprised to see options to expand this for a fee in future.

Overall this is a stunningly designed tool that has massive potential and could prove incredibly useful if you manage many different online tools (and I know most people reading this do!).

I have 5 invites available, if you would like one please leave a message in the comments. And then share your creative uses of ifttt.

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Off topic but incredibly useful!

Noted is a new app that does one thing and one thing well. It opens up, you type a note, you click send and it appears in your inbox.

I’ve used dozens of to-do productivity style apps and with the best will in the world I make big old to-do lists and then quickly stop forget all about them.

90% of my to-do’s seem to come through my inbox, so this incredibly quick way of dumping other things in my inbox might just stop me losing them on little bits of paper!

£1.19 in the App Store.

How do you manage your busy life?

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Thanks to Tom Barrett for pointing out this fantastic video. Great resource for assemblies, Geography lessons, Science lessons etc.

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I’ve spent the morning travelling back in time to my childhood in 1986 via the BBC Domesday Project!

This picture has me intrigued as it’s taken near my school and must be children within about a year of me at school – how quickly the memories fade, I can’t recognise any of them!

The Story of the Domesday Project

In 1986, 900 years after William the Conqueror’s original Domesday Book, the BBC published the Domesday Project. The project was probably the most ambitious attempt ever to capture the essence of life in the United Kingdom. Over a million people contributed to this digital snapshot of the country.

People were asked to record what they thought would be of interest in another 1000 years.

The whole of the UK – including the Channel Islands and Isle of Man – was divided into 23,000 4x3km areas called Domesday Squares or “D-Blocks”.

Schools and community groups surveyed over 108,000 square km of the UK and submitted more than 147,819 pages of text articles and 23,225 amateur photos, cataloguing what it was like to live, work and play in their community.

This was about documenting everyday life – the ordinary rather than the extraordinary.

The project used the cutting edge technology of the day, and the data was eventually presented on a special type of Laser-Disc, read by a BBC master computer and navigated using an innovative tracker-ball pointing system.

But the technology didn’t catch on and the computers became very expensive for schools and libraries to buy. Very few people ever got to see the fruits of all of their hard work.

As time went on there were fears that the discs would become unreadable, as computers capable of reading the format had become rare and drives capable of accessing the discs even rarer.

Now 25 years later in our age of the world wide web, digital photography, email and social networking, its time to have a look at those entries again, to bring the project up to date, and perhaps to lay down another layer of local history.

Here you can rediscover and explore images and articles from the original project to find out how life in Britain has changed… and how some things have stayed the same. In addition, you will be able to update the project by re-photographing the images today and updating text entries.

With the help of The National Archives this unique record will be preserved for future generations.

This is obviously a rich teaching resource for delving back 25 years into life near your school, and also a great chance to record for posterity life in 2011 in your little corner of the UK.

On a geeky level how interesting it is to see how this information had to be pretty much rescued from the laser discs it was stored on as the technology quickly became obsolete. In this age where everything is stored digitally it’ll be interesting to see if we hit similar problems in the future.

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