Here’s a summary of some of the things I learned and published this week.
Readings
You can follow my daily readings as they happen here. Below are a selected few, with commentary, from the past week.
Sunday
- I’m sure that the folks in Ottawa were happy to see school open for their children; the people who have to get up to speed quickly are bus drivers
- So, Bernie Sanders’ mittens went viral. Who made them? Find out about her here
Monday
- With all the anti-Google stuff that’s going around, they should do this before they’re forced to
- So, here’s an example from Australia. I don’t know that I would switch to Bing; I’d quite happy right now with Duckduckgo
Tuesday
- I had a request from a former colleague about publishing a book online for kids and suggested this
- I like this concept – the west end of Windsor has been the ignored part of the city and deserves an upgrade
Wednesday
- I’m a sucker for stories about the best and the worst. Not that it’s necessarily true but interesting. This time, programming languages. Scratch?
- I’m torn with this new feature to Vivaldi. I like the concept but don’t know if I’m ready to give up the screen real estate
Thursday
- If and when this becomes available in Canada, educators will like it as a tool to fact check
- My new winter coat arrived just in time for this attack of the Polar vortex
Friday
- Finally, someone lets us know that learning Scratch won’t make you a billionaire and says it out loud
- So, we’re living in COVID times, why not make a meme of it for teachers and parents?
Saturday
- I don’t use Microsoft Office apps at the best of times opting for LibreOffice or Google Workspace. Apparently Google Workspace is getting even better
- I never was a fan of Pokemon Go and I’ll bet these folks from Kingsville aren’t in a hurry to play it again either after their fine
Blog Posts on
doug … off the record
My daily contributions to this blog are linked below. If you’re looking for a week in review for doug–off the record, you came to the right place.
- Sunday – My Week Ending January 31, 2021
- Weekly summary of things around here
- Monday – Comfortable keyboarding
- Time to upgrade my keyboard but to what?
- Tuesday – Curating Groundhogs
- An annual event in some part of the world
- Wednesday – An experiment worth enabling
- A flag for Google Chrome worth experimenting with
- Thursday – Monitoring the flattening
- Yet another interesting COVID visualization tool
- Friday – This Week in Ontario Edublogs
- My weekly look at seven blog posts from around the province
- Saturday – The music
- Missed this on Wednesday
- Sunday – Whatever happened to … ?
- A weekly fun post to try to get you to reflect on things and share your thoughts
#FollowFriday – February 5, 2021

voicEd Radio

On this week’s show, Stephen Hurley and I chatted about foxes, phone calls, history, JK, and debt
The show is available here: https://voiced.ca/podcast_episode_post/stories-freedom-and-virtual-teaching/
Noa Daniels – @noasbobs
Richard Erdmann – @rerdmann
John Hoffman – @UncommonJohn
Amy Bowker – @amyebowker
W!ll Gourley – @WillGourley
Intro Song:
Closing Song:
All of the podcasts are archived here. The show is broadcast LIVE almost every Wednesday morning at 9:15 on voicEd Radio.
Technology Troubleshooting
Coats are a technology, right?
I got a new coat this week – just in time for this polar vortex. It came with a hood and a fringe around it. It didn’t come with a user’s manual though!
And I had a problem with it. It seemed to go over my head too far. The problem was that the fringe limited by vision. My wife said “deal with it”.
I just had a look at the coat and there was this odd little thing that, upon further inspection, appears to be an adjuster. I’ve tightened it which should solve my problem. I’ll find out later at the next dog walk.
Video of the Week
Strange? Fascinating
Photo of the Week
I am NOT a groundhog.

Thanks for reading.
Please join me daily for something new and, hopefully, interesting for you. I honestly and truthfully appreciate your few moments reading my thoughts. Time willing, this summary appears every Sunday afternoon.
Be safe.
dp
This blog post was originally posted at:
https://dougpete.wordpress.com/
If you find it anywhere else, it’s not original.