MSM 565 Do You Know Where the Fire Escape Goes To? I Do…
Summary:
Shawn and Troy talk about the NCSS Conference, 7th-grade art, and more. Dave drops the SKNOWLEDGE.
Jokes:
If Schrodinger’s cat was a fugitive from the law would he be wanted > dead & alive?
Strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet and friends are just enemies you haven’t made yet.
Geology rocks but Geography is where it’s at!
Three weeks ago I sent my hearing aids in for repair.
- I’ve heard nothing since.
Most of the year I have a lot of faith
- Around the holidays I start to become more eggnogstic.
I remodeled my kitchen.
- I told the carpenters to not go too fast with refinishing the kitchen cabinets. When they asked why, I explained that I am afraid of quicksand.
Someone asked me what ‘contemplate’ means, I’ve given it a lot of thought
Making digital art and canvas art is quite easy.
- But paper is where I draw the line.
Potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, yams…. I’ll never forget my roots
Middle School Science Minute
by Dave Bydlowski (k12science or davidbydlowski@mac.com)
K12Science Podcast: Sknowledge (Snow Knowledge)
I was recently reading the November/December 2022 issue of “Science Scope” a publication of the National Science Teaching Association.
In this issue, I read the “Citizen Science” column, written by Jill Nugent. She wrote a column entitled, “Get in the “Sknow” for Science!”
The Sknowledge project was formed around the natural curiosity that students have for the outdoors and the snow. The project goal is to help scientists ground truth winter weather data, one snowball at a time by measuring snow depth, air temperature, and cloud cover, and the ability to make a snowball. For more information, visit:
http://k12science.net/sknowledge-snow-knowledge/
Reports from the Front Lines
- NCSS Annual Conference
- 10 work days until Christmas Break
- ISTE coming to Philadelphia, NCSS coming to Boston, AMLE coming to National Harbor, MD
- 7th Grade Art
- Summarizer
- 10 Amendments Ranking
The Twitter-Feder-verse
We’re loving the festive new #StatsInSchools @Kahoot game from our friends at the @uscensusbureau. Thanks for helping to make statistics meaningful and fun for students! Check it out https://okt.to/wR8JHT
Word of the day is ‘blear-witted’ (17th century): entirely lacking in foresight and clouded in judgment.
Word of the day is ‘growlery’ (1853, from Charles Dickens): a place you retreat to for the purposes of growling, muttering, and letting off steam.
Heather Cox Richardson (TDPR) @HC_Richardson
It’s Steven Wright’s birthday. Do yourself a favor and read the tweets in his honor.
Hey! @HerbertHistory‘s podcast has arrived!! #HATM people, unite! https://t.co/4kFM6aDTDg
Typical EduCelebrity @EduCelebrity
Teacher: What was the most useless innovation in schools? Me: The Spork
#mschat every Thursday at 8:00 pm Eastern Standard Time. And as Troy says, “The Twitter never stops!”
Strategies:
Games to Improve Executive Functioning Skills
Service Project Idea
When filling out your Christmas cards this year, take one card and send it to this address:
A Recovering American Soldier
c/o Walter Reed National Military Medical Center
8901 Rockville Pike
Bethesda, MD 20889-5600
Resources:
Bouncy Balls!
A fun way to visualize music or monitor classroom noise.
Desperation Notifications!
Social media platforms are leaning into deceptive design patterns to capture your attention but they’re just contributing to our growing “notification anxiety”
https://stribs.medium.com/desperation-notifications-9a353a96622
Common Sense Society
Common Sense Society (CSS) was founded as a debating forum in 2009 by a group of American and European university students. The group aimed to explore the ideas, cultures, and geography that have shaped our history in order to best contribute to a future that fosters human flourishing. In doing so, CSS became a celebration of the political, intellectual, and cultural inheritance which constitute our shared civilization.
Examples:
Protecting the People: Limited and Absolute Governments compares and contrasts the differences between limited and absolute governments and asks, “which system better protects human rights and happiness?” https://www.commonsensesociety.org/education-arch/protecting-the-people-limited-and-absolute-governments/
The Ancients and the Founders considers whether the U.S. Constitution overcomes the problems found in ancient governments and asks, “are there problems endemic to every democratic society that are impossible to eradicate?” https://www.commonsensesociety.org/education-arch/ancients-founders/
Supporting Gifted ELLs: Effective Strategies for the Social Studies Classroom – Elizabeth Rasmussen, PhD candidate at USF
NCSS 2022 Handouts for Effective Strategies for the Social Studies Classroom session.
AXIS: The Culture Translator
AI Did Not Write This Newsletter
What it is: ChatGPT became the internet’s robot darling this week, with curious users asking the interface questions and being bemused, surprised, or creeped out at its high functionality.
A New Lens
What it is: Earlier this month, Lensa became the #1 app in the Apple store’s “Photo and Video” category after releasing a feature called “magic avatars,” customized pieces of AI-generated digital art.
Why it’s an ethical conundrum: Lensa asks users to upload a minimum of 10 photos of their face to its app before it can generate a magic avatar. It then takes these photos and uses open-source tech called “stable diffusion” to produce artwork of the user in several different styles. These attractive-looking avatars are perfect for profile pictures, dating profiles, or just sharing online, and #lensa already has over 600,000 posts tagged on Instagram
Asteroid Launcher
https://neal.fun/asteroid-launcher/
Web Spotlight:
English Learner Collaborations – Massachusetts Council for the Social Studies
Language-aware lessons support all students, especially Multilingual Learners who are still developing in English, access primary-source rich learning.
http://www.emergingamerica.org/english-learner-collaborations
Font Advent
Each day of the advent calendar will feature a different type foundry and highlight some of their most notable typefaces. It will be a highly opinionated and almost arbitrary selection of a few of my favorites from the list.
https://matthiasott.com/notes/independent-type-foundry-advent-calendar-2022
How Christmas became an American holiday tradition, with a Santa Claus, gifts & a tree
Christmas trees and gift-giving on Dec. 24 in Germany did not spread to other European Christian cultures until the end of the 18th century and did not come to North America until the 1830s.
From the onset, all family members, including children, were expected to participate in the gift-giving. Gifts were not brought by a mystical figure, but openly exchanged among family members – symbolizing the new middle-class culture of egalitarianism.
GPT Detector
This is an online demo of the GPT-2 output detector model, based on the 🤗/Transformers implementation of RoBERTa. Enter some text in the text box; the predicted probabilities will be displayed below. The results start to get reliable after around 50 tokens.
https://huggingface.co/openai-detector#annotations:11Rh7ncJEe2j7w9RO0EDAQ
This Is Where Most of the World’s Soccer Balls Come From
Sialkot, a city in northeast Pakistan, produces about 70% of the world’s supply—including Adidas’s Al Rihla, the official ball of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.
More than 80% of the soccer balls made in Sialkot use hand stitching, a laborious process that makes the ball more durable and gives it more aerodynamic stability. The seams are deeper, and the stitches have greater tension than those sewn with machines.
At manufacturer Anwar Khawaja Industries, stitchers get paid roughly 160 rupees—about $0.75—per ball. Each one takes three hours to complete. At three balls a day, a stitcher can earn about 9,600 rupees per month. Even for a poor region, the wages are low. A living wage for Sialkot is around 20,000 rupees a month, according to researcher estimates.
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