Peter Beens
Ontario educators, I’ve attempted to archive all curriculum-related documents here.
Please let me know if I’m missing anything.
If you have any old documents in your possession, please reach out to me via the comments below (or Twitter) and I’ll send you my email address.
If you wish to respond by Twitter, you can do so here.
https://github.com/pbeens/Curriculum/tree/master/Canada/Ontario
From an email shared on the Communications Technology email list:
The 26th Annual Zoom International Student Film Festival is now open for submissions! The festival is open to all high school students worldwide between the ages of 14-18 and it’s free to enter. It’s a great opportunity for students to showcase their work on an international scale! The festival will take place on April 20th @ 7PM. Deadline to submit a film is April 14th. For more information about the festival and/or to submit a film go to: https://earlhaig.ca/zoom/
I received an email this morning from Koingo Software, a company I first purchased from in 2008. They’ve now branched out into selling software deals, many of which are quite good.
The deal that I want to share today is Microsoft Office Professional 2021, for both Mac and Windows. These are not subscriptions, they are a one-time purchase of $49.99.
The regular price is $349, so this is a great deal.
You can purchase the Windows version here and the Mac version here.
I’m not sure how long this deal lasts so you may want to act fast.
Spammers just aren’t very smart.
I received a phone call from a friend concerned that her credit card was being charged for an antivirus program she no longer used. I asked her who the email was from and she replied it was from a cryptic Gmail account. No reputable business would send customers emails from a Gmail account. Yes, some small companies might use Gmail, but certainly not companies like McAfee or Norton.
Coincidentally, here’s an email I received a day or two after my friend. There were so many red flags I thought it would be interesting to share.
If you ever get an email you are unsure about, look for these giveaways:
Are there any dead giveaways I’ve missed? If so, let me know in the comments below!
New post on the Photo Blog:
https://www.beens.ca/photo/hamilton-harbour-panorama-colour-or-bw/
It’s great to hear from Dr. Chuck Severance again. I took many of his Python courses on Coursera and find him to be an excellent instructor.
In this short video he addresses privacy and LMSes and how schools pay little attention to privacy issues regarding their LMSes. He mentions how the vendors control all the data, and we have been pushing the priority of ethics and privacy concerns back.
I admit that in my classroom I didn’t know how private my students’ personal data truly was. I just trusted in the companies that hosted the LMSes (D2L, Google) that they would not abuse the information nor use it in unethical ways.
Did your school board address student privacy when it considered which LMS to use? Is its privacy policy or privacy study public? Please share!
I’ve really been enjoying learning about data analysis lately. Part of what’s made it so enjoyable is the use of Colab, which is Google’s version of Jupyter Notebook.
I came across a need to convert some lists of data to a CSV (comma separated values) format so I could paste it into a Google Sheet. Not finding anything online to do I decided to write my own, and here is the product.
The Colab notebook I created has been saved as a “gist”, which is GitHub’s cousin for fast and easy file storage service. The Gist website is also very popular for sharing CSV files, which this search will attest to.
You’ll notice an “Open in Colab” button at the top, which is how you will open the document. A really nice feature is that it is fully usable without needing to save the file anywhere, but for those that do want to save their work, they can, into Google Drive.
When you first run it, you’ll get a scary message that was written by Google’s lawyers. You’ll see from the source code that the notebook’s not doing anything nefarious, so just trust me and click on “Run Anyway”. 😆
This is a preview of the notebook. To open it, click here or on the filename on the bottom left corner of the preview.
Some Python programmers may want to remind me that I could have used Python’s built-in CSV library, but I felt Pandas would be faster, especially for large lists.
I hope some of you find this useful, although I’ll be happy if it gets some of you interested in Colab for Python programming or for data analysis, or even if it just introduces you to the Gist website.
Why might we want to integrate Google Drive into Google Colab? The primary reason for this would be to easily access data files to use in your Colab notebooks.
Here is a video that outlines the basic process. For written instructions, see below.
Integrating Google Drive into Google Colab is quite simple. The first step is to go to Google Colab, then open a new notebook.
Continue reading “Integrating Google Drive into Google Colab Notebooks”Do you ever have the need to schedule a threaded tweet?
It’s something you can’t do on Twitter, so I was relieved to find this temporary offer from OneUp for a free, lifetime account to their service which allows me to do exactly that. Continue reading “Shout Out to OneUp Twitter App”
I always have the annual Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day marked in my calendar, but sadly often miss it due to extenuating circumstances.
But not this year…
I started my journey in Port Robinson where I saw this abandoned bridge. I had the camera, a Nikon D750, mounted on a monopod which helped stabilize the 1.5 second exposure. I submitted this image to the Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day exhibit, even though I took some others that I also liked.
Moving to a path in the woods next to the bridge, I then took this abstract image of some small trees and bushes. It didn’t start out to be abstract, but a gust of wind hit me just as I was taking the 2 second exposure which resulted in the motion blur. Normally I would have deleted the image but in this case it worked!
Next I set out along some back roads looking for suitable scenes. This one suited me fine:
As well as this one:
Overall, I think it was a successful day. In past years I’ve gone out and maybe only had one photo I was willing to share. It’s a very hit-and-miss process because you really don’t know how they will look until you get back to your computer to look at them enlarged.
In my case though, the process is much easier than many other photographers because I’m using a digital camera with a pinhole adapter. Many other photographers use homemade cameras with film that of course makes the process much more complicated.
Here is the pinhole adapter that I used. As you can see, the adapter replaces the lens so the pictures are taken without a lens!
If you’d like to see other photos that were submitted by Canadian photographers, visit here.