Category: creativity

  • Scratch Coding Resources

    Scratch Coding Resources

    I received an email earlier this year from a teacher in South Africa who is interested in starting a school and including coding in the curriculum. I finally responded to that message (yikes!) asking for links to CODING RESOURCES I use and have shared, including resources for using Scratch coding from MIT. These are the…

  • Favorite Digital Utilities

    Favorite Digital Utilities

    What are the websites, web services, and software applications you use regularly and can’t imagine doing without? I call these my “favorite digital utilities,” and today I created a specific webpage for them on my curriculum / lesson sharing website which is built with Google Sites. As an example, I used the website Flickr to…

  • Visualizing Off-Planet Habitats

    Visualizing Off-Planet Habitats

    My middle school computer programming students are continuing to work on our “Coding Mars” unit, in which they are using Minecraft MakeCode to simulate the 3D printing of structures and habitats which Icon of Austin, Texas, is under contract with NASA to do first on the moon / the lunar surface and (ultimately) on Mars.…

  • Social Media Text Prepper

    Social Media Text Prepper

    It is now possible to use generative AI / artificial intelligence platforms, like ChatGPT 4, to create simple to relatively complex web applications without knowing the precise syntax of programming languages. By formulating detailed prompts for the AI chatbot, it is possible to create code in various languages (including javascript and HTML) which the user…

  • AI Bionic Blogging

    New tools can provide new opportunities to not only “enhance efficiency,” but (in some cases) “transformatively empower” users to do things which were previously impossible. In the case of artificial intelligence / AI technologies, the combination of speech to text, automated transcription and “content augmentation” services can enable new, transformative content creation workflows. In this…

  • Generative AI and Media Tips (Oct 2023)

    One of the advantages of sharing ideas and links on your own website, like this WordPress website I’ve maintained since 2005, is that social media and technology companies are less able to restrict the links you can share. In June of 2023, both Facebook and Instagram started blocking access to some news websites and stopping…

  • Reflections on PD Hackathon 2023

    Today I’ve had an opportunity to participate, facilitate, and volunteer as a judge in our fall 2023 Hackathon at our school, Providence Day School of Charlotte, North Carolina. This is the second time I’ve been able to be part of the Hackathon, and in this post I’d like to reflect a little about some of…

  • “Drawing as a Thinking Process” by Manuel Herrera

    This is a “lightly edited” ChatGPT-created summary of a Twitter thread I created today, attending Manuel Herrera’s (@manuelherrera33) wonderful NCTIES 2023 Conference session, “Drawing as a Thinking Process” today in Raleigh, North Carolina. I’ve inserted photos from the Twitter thread, which I shared on Flickr under a CC-BY license. I generated the attribution captions using…

  • Minecraft, YouTube and Communication Skills

    Yesterday morning I spent some time finalizing my podcast migration to Anchor. My “Moving at the Speed of Creativity” podcast channel, which I launched in 2005, now has 481 episodes. The RSS feed I used previously, (before Anchor: Created with the Podlove Podcast Publisher) just included the most recent 50 episodes. Those 50 episodes uploaded…

  • Podcast481: CMC World Student News

    This podcast features an October 2022 with middle school student CMC (his public alias) who is the creator of CMC World News (cmcworldnews.com). In this 20 minute conversation, CMC shares the origin story of CMC World News and how he came up with the idea, developed the website, and now maintains it with news articles…