You would have thought that our habits of take-out and box sets would have prepared us for isolation, but we're social creatures and it's become clear these past weeks that we crave conversation and connection.
I was feeling a little down on our zoom sessions, feeling the burn a little, but a fun session rejuvenated our lesson. Everyone looks forward to getting together each week. There are a few zoom games that you might like to try which we've had some success with, try and pass the banana from screen to screen (you get the idea) or throw a roll of toilet paper to each other (tip, you need another person in your room to help you). These ideas might seem trivial and a bit silly, but the smiles on the screen make it all worthwhile.
Please feel free to use this newsletter to share ideas and point people to resources. I will attempt to publish each Friday morning, so please get your emails to me by Thursday afternoon. Please take care of yourselves, look after each other and be kind.
Illustrator May van Millingen completes a series of illustrations depicting the current 'stay at home situation.
People, Places, and Things
In our LangTech class, we had a chat with Prof. Stephen Heppell and you might like to take a look at his site, which has had over 25 million visitors since launch. Stephen's quest is to maximize the learning opportunities, make small adjustments that can accumulate big gains. I love these examples from Stephen's Pinterest Board.
Regular readers might be surprised by the lack of podcast links in the past few issues, but I can make up for that now, not just shows that reflect the current crisis but recommendations for a few others.
The first is Writ Large, a podcast about books that changed the world, this is the time to catch up on your reading, if only to rest our eyes from screens. The Modern Love podcast has Daniel Radcliffe reading a story. Finally, if you're interested in the origin of words and phrases, then The Allusionist presented by Helen Zaltzman is both fun and fascinating, you'll feel happier and smarter by the end of each episode.
Finally, give yourself a break, I enjoyed this article from the NYT reminding us that it's okay to just cope, we shouldn't be putting too much pressure on ourselves at this time.
Steve Smith talks about a common model of working and long-term memory and how we can help students remember what they learn.
On remote learning and working.
There are open-source alternatives to Zoom, including the excellent Jitsi which is a pretty stable conferencing tool with some neat features. If you feel that you'd like to avoid the privacy issues (that are to be fair, being addressed) or just fancy a change give it a go. You just visit the site, pick a name for a room and share the link.
I forgot to let you know that Stephen Heppell has created a page helping you to optimize your working from home setup.
Last week I linked Bryan Mather's website of Visual Thinkery, but in a recent newsletter, he reminded us that there's another site where you can remix these images. It's fun to do but at the same time, it’s a gallery of edtech and education memes and images. If you don't know where to start, try this flipbook.
Remix 'n' Match by @visualthinkery is licensed under CC-BY-SA.
On Screen
Just a few things that I saw this week and wanted to share.