Provided I don’t sleep in too late, I start my morning with a round of Wordle, Crazy Phrase, and Canuckle.
This is about Wordle. I start every game with the same word ORATE. I figure it’s a high probability of getting some letters correct and usually do.
I think I’ve lost a couple of times, usually when I get caught up in a word grouping where success is generally a lucky guess.
I’ve never been inspired to look for a cheat for the game; typically I’m playing so early in the morning and this just wakes me up.
Yesterday, I stumbled upon this resource that claims to have “Every Possible Wordle Solution Visualized”. I’d already solved the day’s Wordle so it wouldn’t be cheating. There’s so much packed into this beyond just the game.
The visualization looks like this.
I started with my O and worked my way through the visualization and so my exhaustive test was to make sure that ORATE was in there. There’s more than just letter connections but the green cells are found in higher frequency when connected.
At the bottom, there’s a more traditional grid for placing letters but the visualization above really caught my fancy.
Of course, the programmer in me started mentally hacking away at what might be the algorithm for something like this.
The results are really beautifully laid out. My hats off for that.
It’s not a transferable tool for Crazy Phrase or Canuckle and I think you owe it to your thinking not to cheat at Wordle. But, what a visualization!
I could even see this blown up on screen in class while a word is thought of and the use of probability, etc. to track through and guess the word would be fun.
So, what do you think? Cheating?
I just know you’re going to click through just to try it out.
We started the voicEd Radio discussion with this song from the great John Anderson.
I don’t ever recall talking about work/life balance at the faculty. It was something that I came to learn as I entered the profession. I’ll be honest; for the most part, it was just talk because of the nature of the job. It will eat you alive if you let it.
Elizabeth recognizes that there are other important things in life along with teaching and addresses it in this post. To be truthful, she doesn’t belittle the profession; she does a great job of sharing where she is with her class and her philosophy.
Like so many of us, she has a wonderful family that deserves part of her time and attention as well. It’s the condition of teaching that we’re forever balancing this.
A teacher’s life is like no other. She captures so much of it in this post. And, it’s just not home/work; there’s all the professional development that an educator needs and couple that with being an educational leader in the province, there are so many things competing for your time and attention …
I like it when Cal takes on a topic and takes it in an interesting direction. I came to the post ready to argue because ChatGPT is notorious for getting things wrong at times. I misjudged what this post was going to be about.
Cal notes that he’s worked with interactive bots for a long time as well as many of the popular Mathematics applications. One thread through all of this is that getting the answer right is important.
But, what about the process?
Cal introduces us to a new application (well, new to me anyway) called MathGrader and how it could be the solution to having Artificial Intelligence do some marking for you along with understanding the process that students go through to get their answer.
It’s an interesting read and it doesn’t come as a surprise to me that Cal sees it being integrated into OneNote some day.
If you are using Brightspace/D2L or there’s a chance that you will be, this is definitely worth the time to read. Actually, I’d recommend bookmarking and reading more than once.
Lynn certainly takes a deep dive into using this resource in your classes.
By default, often LMS systems are boring text interfaces and the activities often aren’t similar at all to good classroom pedagogy.
Lynn tears this apart with all kinds of ideas to make the interface more appealing and the content more engaging with the hopes of better success and interaction with your content.
She addresses:
Environment
Active Learning & Engagement
Stress Management
It’s a huge affirmation that teaching and learning online doesn’t have to be completely different.
Melanie shares a writing prompt that she has used with us.
A writing prompt that I used recently asked students to consider a time when they lost something important.
I had two reactions to this post.
The first one was the one that I shared on the This Week in Ontario Edublogs show. It was personal about something that I had lost – my wedding band (twice). Recovered once from a museum in Ottawa and secondly, I’m still looking for it. In that respect, the prompt let me have fun with my misfortune.
What I didn’t talk about on the show was that Melanie followed up her prompt with personal experiences of her own. I didn’t mention it but in passing because it’s the sort of thing that would make me tear up and choke.
She shared her story and her very emotional, personal take on the writing prompt.
I couldn’t help but wonder if her writing prompt might have generated similar stories from her students.
Peter is my best “way back” and “way forward” thinking guy. He knows and has made so many connectors with people who have made significant changes in the use of technology in education.
In celebration of International Woman’s Day, Peter takes us on a trip back and looks at the work of Cynthia along with Seymour Papert.
The programming, of course, was Logo. So often, these days, when you mention Logo, it’s poo-pooed. “We introduce kids to Python, a real programming language.”
I’ve always maintained, and I still do, that that philosophy completely misses the point. My first programming language certainly isn’t in vogue these days. But, the problem solving, thinking, and collaboration has lasted me a lifetime.
I miss meeting up with Peter; just chatting with him is so powerful. This post will have to serve as a proxy.
Thanks, my friend.
And here we are at the end of another week. Please take the time to click through and read these posts. You’ll be that much smarter for doing so. And, share them with colleagues.
One of the things about being a computer science teacher is that you’re always looking for program ideas that will engage students. I never had a decent textbook so just about everything that we did was from my mind.
A lot of times, I’d take problems from university and modify them to be appropriate but, for the most part, they were ideas that I came up with. I wasn’t alone and a few others in the board would share ideas when we got together for PD days. You know what they say about necessity…
One of the really enjoyable problems that we did was taking a message and encoding it so that it wasn’t readable by others. Of course, going along with that was another program that would take an encoded message and decode it. The students found them fun to write and fun to send messages to each other that I couldn’t read!
It met one of the requirements in the Grade 11 course and that was to understand ASCII codes. You know, the letter A is character 65, B is character 66, etc.
The algorithm was fairly straightforward (in my mind)…
read the string to be encoded
extract the first letter and add a number to its ASCII code
if that number went past Z (ASCII 90), then wrap around and start at the beginning of the ASCII codes again
convert the resulting number into its ASCII code
concatenate that letter to the secret message
repeat until the message is complete encoded
Then, you’d send the encoded message to a friend and the number used to decode it in a separate message. (that led to an interesting discussion about security)
For most of the students, that wasn’t enough. They wanted more security and so added expressions for the encoding/decoding and a couple even wrote a program to try and “hack” one of their classmate’s messages. If I didn’t have a due date set, I’m sure we could have milked that one for an entire year.
Now, the whole idea for the program was probably given by me and I’m not egotistical enough to think I made it up originally; I would have got the idea from somewhere else and that’s OK.
One of the things that I never got was “Sir, when are we ever going to use this?” They could see it being of value.
The other day, I read an article that absolutely put this into perspective.
I think we all know that those numbers on our credit cards aren’t just random. This is a fascinating read that shows how the algorithms are created and it provides the Regex and Python code to do the deed. Even if you don’t develop a program to do this, it’s a great read for students.
Problems like this highlight another challenge of teaching computer science. Especially with computers, it’s easy to send your code to someone else. Or, in this case, just copy it from the article.
The answer to this is why it’s important to have a teacher in the classroom and not just mail the answer in. A teacher will sit next to a student and ask for an explanation of the solution to the problem. Or, go ahead and modify the problem requirements just even so slightly and see if they know enough of the algorithm to make the changes.
This could just be the start of something good. Like maybe talking more about encryption and checksums. In a world where hard cash money is used less and less and replaced with plastic, it most certainly is a relevant activity that will pay off.
I included this in last week’s This Week in Ontario Edublogs post but felt I needed to make it stand alone as so many people look for resources and inspiration. There are resources, good and bad, all over the internet. They might apply in other classrooms but not yours.
So many educators throughout the province are cutting their teeth with “Coding” in the Classroom this year. Some may have never thought it would ever happen but it has.
This resource, on the TVO Outreach site with resources for people looking for a nice, Ontario way to get started. They address our curriculum and talk about strategies that should be part of everyone’s teaching toolkit already.
I’ve been resisting turning on the furnace this week. I will confess to wearing my Bring IT, Together jacket, a toque, and gloves while walking the dog in the morning. The promise is that this weekend is going to be great weather. I hope so as we have an outdoor wedding to attend.
As I mentioned on the voicEd Radio show, this is a concept that isn’t taught in depth at the Faculty of Education but really should be.
Every teacher wants to be the best that they can be. That goes without saying when you enter the profession.
However, Amanda’s post reminds us that you are more than that as a person. Your job is only one part of you and there’s so much more that you have going on. Teaching is a profession that will entirely eat you alive if you let it.
Amanda tells us that mindfulness is something that helped her. You’ve got to believe that it makes her that better person she wants to be and I can’t help but believe that it makes her a better teacher as well.
I really enjoyed this post from Will. It should serve us all as a reminder that, as we rush to return to normal, what’s the rush? Is there a rush for returning too quickly?
Thank you for resisting those urges to get down to business so quickly. It can wait.
As the teacher in the room, you’re not the only one who has been off your game for the past few years. Those kids are too. I’m reading all over the place that concentrating on work and getting the job done is so hard for students, particularly from teachers who want “normal”.
Will includes a pretty interesting list of things that would be second nature four or five years ago and now seem strangely useless in the context of this whole post.
It’s time to stop and reflect on what’s really important. Giving up a little of the hard-core academics and focusing on relationships will undoubtedly pay off in the long run.
This secondary school computer science teacher was completely out of his element here when Deanna talks about the process that she uses to create a sensory wall as the focal point in her classroom.
I enjoyed reading about how she gathered, measured, and crafted this.
Thanks, Deanna McLennan
Why?
Because it’s the right thing to do. She has students that need it.
Read the post and celebrate the success that she enjoyed and then perhaps think about the things that you’ve personally done to make things better at your own expense and efforts. Deanna and I had the same employer and I don’t recall any of this being on the bulk order list.
Trust Doug to write something completely off the wall.
In this case, it’s an article for/about Wordle fanatics (of which, I guess I’m one) and there’s a little editorial content from Doug here.
At least I think so.
He’s taken what’s probably a good blog post and replaced all the five-letter words with Wordle-like puzzles to solve.
I spend far too much time reading and trying to “solve” this blog. He didn’t say that all my guesses were wrong; just the one that I used six letters for.
I’ll confess and admit that I started typing “Derek” and probably only a Floyd or an RCAC member would understand…
So many educators throughout the province are cutting their teeth with “Coding” in the Classroom this year. Some may have never thought it would ever happen but it has.
The Floyds have created this resource on the TVO Outreach site with resources for people looking for a nice, Ontario way to get started. They address our curriculum and talk about strategies that should be part of everyone’s teaching toolkit already.
Diane’s post wonderfully describes the experience that many second or more language learners have once dropped in a classroom where other languages are spoken.
I loved the reference to how important our first language is and how it helps define an identity. Through the eyes of “Farah”, she describes some classroom experiences and responses that could have happened in any classroom. When the eyes “widen”, your teacher heart has to warm up.
There’s a wonderful description of the process of moving from an “English-only school environment to a framework of multilingualism”.
The blank leaves are a powerful point in this whole post.
Click through, read, and enjoy.
I hope that you can find some time this weekend to click through and enjoy all these terrific posts. Drop them a comment and then follow them on Twitter. Also, follow their blogs in your blog reader.
Amanda Hardy
Will Gourley – @WillGourley
Diana Maliszewski – @MzMollyTL
Deanna McLennan – @McLennan1977
Doug McDowall – @dougzone2_1
Lisa Anne Floyd – @lisaannefloyd
Steven Floyd – @stevenpfloyd
Diane Kim
This Week in Ontario Edublogs Wednesday mornings on voicEd Radio
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doug --- off the record 