My Kindle Scribe Feature Wishlist

Don't want the back-story & just came for the list? Click here.

I've had a Kindle since Christmas Day 2010. It was a Kindle Keyboard 3G: one of those with a free mobile internet connection so you could download new books on the fly, hassle free. My mum got it for me for Christmas and, twelve-years-and-counting later, it's still going strong. I've always loved it^[1], and I've regularly been tempted to upgrade to a new model but didn't because, well, I had no reason too. None of the following models added anything I needed or even that I particularly coveted.

Amazon's long-discontinued Kindle Keyboard 3G

For twelve years there was only really one thing I could think of that would make me want to upgrade my Kindle to a new model. For twelve years I waited.

And then it came.

The VISITOR Project, part 0: An introduction

In February 2023 I attended a training event hosted by the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University in Milton Keynes, designed to introduce us to VISITOR, a project aimed primarily at teachers but of explicit relevance to educators in the heritage sector too.

It's possible to wander around various heritage sites, including the British Museum, via the medium of Google Street View (try it, above), but should virtual visits be limited to simply recreating the physical visitor experience in the digital domain?

This started as a review of the training, but I found the project so fascinating it became more of a commentary on the broader project and its outputs, growing beyond all sensible bounds for just one post. I decided to split it into a series of (approximately)^[1] four posts, each dedicated to a VISITOR project output (see below).

I hope that it may be of use to fellow educators in the education and/or heritage sectors. I welcome and encourage further discussion related to anything written in this series but it must be made clear that I have no official relationship with the project: it just ticks a host of boxes related to my professional and personal interests.

How Can I Support My Child in Learning Maths?

A normal week has 168 hours in it. Assuming 8 hours sleep a night^[1], that's 112 waking hours for doing everything else, including learning things. In a school week, children spend somewhere between 3 and 5 hours in maths lessons^[2] depending on various factors such as which school they go to and what year they're in. That, using the middle of that range, is about 3.5% of a teenager's working week.

TLDR: Model resilience & positivity, and engage with the subject in front of and with them, just like you would in any other area of their development.

What does ChatGPT Think About Maths?

The chances are you've heard of ChatGPT, but you might not know what it is. Just in case, I asked it what it was. It said:

"ChatGPT is a conversational artificial intelligence language model developed by OpenAI. It uses state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms and a massive dataset to generate human-like responses to natural language inputs. ChatGPT is trained on a diverse range of topics and can answer a wide range of questions, making it an extremely versatile AI system. It can be used for various applications, such as customer service, knowledge base, language translation, and more."

I didn't have an image for this post so I asked DALL·E 2 "what does ChatGPT look like?"

Why Should Mathematics be Studied Beyond Age 16?

I recently applied for a job ¹ and in preparation for the interview I was told that I would be 'invited to talk for 5 minutes on why mathematics should be studied after GCSE'. I thought that I'd adapt the result into a blog post. So here it is:

MATHS by Klara CC BY-NC-SA 2.0