Ryan Collins

🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

  • Don’t interrupt me

    Research shows that meetings and interruptions have a negative effect on our well being that may “…contribute to burnout, anxiety, depression and other negative emotions“. Combine meetings with interruptions from students, parents, other teachers, and principals, and you have a recipe for grouchy teachers! A person takes 8-10 minutes to get back into a creative state following one interruption. Here are some ideas I had to help you minimize or eliminate interruptions:

    • Students – Lay down rules on when a student is allowed to ask questions or contribute to a discussion. Create procedures for the student to follow to request help or use the bathroom. One idea to ask for help is to use a simple paper cup. If the cup is on the student’s desk or computer, he would like a moment of your time at your earliest convenience.
    • Parents – Notify parents when you are available, and distribute your e-mail address. Let them know they are free to e-mail you at any time. Keep the lines of communication open, but tell them that you are not available to take a call during the day. Sign up for a free Google voice account and give that number out to parents.
    • Teachers – A simple thing such as “If the door is closed, email me” can work wonders.
    • Office – Notify the office that you check e-mail twice a day, and that it is your preferred method of communication. Along the same lines, be sure to check your e-mail twice a day! Follow the idea for teachers above, and close the door when possible.
    • General Ideas – The best line of defense is a good offense. Let others know what interruptions are acceptable to you. You have e-mail, use it to eliminate as many interruptions as you can.

    The key is to put you in control of your interruptions, and let you take care of them when you have time. Everything above is workable (except for emergencies).

  • Pythonista, programming on your iPhone and iPad

    Let me show you something that will make you feel young as when the world was new. — Dr. Carol Marcus

    I feel like a teenager again while playing around with Pythonista (Universal, $6.99), an app for iOS allows you to program in python directly on the device. It reminds me a lot about when I was learning to program in BASIC on my Atari 800XL (my favorite computer ever, although my iPod Touch is a close second). With Pythonista, I can finally write little apps to make my day easier. A lot nicer than going to the App store, downloading a bunch of free apps, all which have obnoxious ads and don’t do quite what I want.

    My first script was written to automate my 365 project. A project that I am terrible at keeping up, but now my DOY script will make it easier when I post once a month. I always struggle with the text I add at the end of my description for the picture, where I calculate the day of the year:

    #365 (218/365)

    I’d end up having to go to a website to find out what the day of the year it was. Well, at least that’s what I did in the past. Now I have written the following script and created a shortcut to it:

    # We're going to need work with dates, access to the clipboard,
# and to launch an app (you use the webbrowser to do that).
import datetime
import clipboard
import webbrowser

# Figure out the day of the year
day_of_year = datetime.datetime.now().timetuple().tm_yday

# Create out tag line
clip = " #365 (" + str(day_of_year) + "/365)"

# Put it in the clipboard
clipboard.set(clip)

# Open Camera+
webbrowser.open('cameraplus://')

    Camera+ has a shoot and share mode, which is what I have set as the default. So now I click on the DOY icon, Pythonista does its thing and Camera+ opens up. I take the picture, type my witty caption, and paste the tagline. Very, very cool.

    Pythonista can also export your script as an XCode project, one that you can load into XCode and create an actual iOS app. I haven’t had the chance to try that out yet. A couple of negatives. Getting scripts into Pythonista can be a lesson in patience. Due to Apple’s limitations on loading code, you cannot simply load code from your Dropbox or other sources, you have to copy and paste. This also means that scripts on your iPhone are automatically synced to your iPad. There is a Dropbox workaround, but I haven’t had the chance to try it out yet. The other negative that I’ve found so far is that there isn’t a built in user interface library, so you’re limited to text or creating your own graphics for things like buttons.

    All in all, it’s well worth the price (especially since it’s universal!).

  • Drafts for iPhone and iPad is the app you never knew you needed

    On its surface, Drafts appears to be yet another note taking app for iOS. Once you dig into it, you begin to realize the power that it yields. After your start it (which is relatively quick even on my aging iPhone 4) you are greeted with a new note or your previous note.

    http://dl.ryancollins.org/blog/draftsnew-m.jpg

    Once you’ve finished typing your note is when the magic begins.

    Drafts has a bunch of built in actions, which allow you to process your note in various ways. The simplest actions do things like save your note to Evernote, or use your note as an email. You can also Tweet your note. I’ve found the Dropbox actions to be very powerful. You can apply templates to your note. For example, my blog posts while I’m working on them have a distinct format:

    Title: This is the title of the post
Date: 2013-08-01 08:00:00
Author: mr.rcollins
Category: Software
Tags: some,great,tags

This is the body of the blog post

    To create a new post in Drafts, I start a new note:

    This is the title of the post
Category: Software
Tags: some,great,tags

This is the body of the blog post

    When I am finished with the note, I use a Drafts Action to save to my drafts folder in Dropbox. The action names the file by the first line in the note, appending a .markdown extension. It then creates the rest of the formatting through the following template before saving it to Dropbox:

    Title: [[title]]
Date: [[date|%F %T]]
Author: mr.rcollins
[[body]]

    http://dl.ryancollins.org/blog/draftssavedraft-m.jpg

    And now I have the blog post formatted correctly. I do have two complaints with the program. The first is that it uses it’s own sync service instead of Dropbox or iCloud. The second is more of a pet peeve, the app isn’t universal, so I ended up paying for the iPad and iPhone version.

    It’s now such an integral part of how I work that I put it in my dock, alone, not in a folder of apps. I use it to send tweets, create emails, start blog posts, and append to notes in Dropbox. The price ($2.99 for iPhone, $3.99 for iPad) was worth it to me.

  • “Well, better get unconventional.” — Dr. Ballard

    “Well, better get unconventional.” — Dr. Ballard

  • Is there anything like Drafts for iOS for Android?

    Is there anything like Drafts for iOS for Android?

  • My work is done

    The daughter knows who Notch is. My work is done.

  • Just a little test

    This is just a little test, please ignore.

  • Pew Research – Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing

    The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing and How Writing is Taught in Schools is a report from the PewResearchCenter creating from surveying Advanced Placement and National Writing Project teachers. Overall, the teachers believe that digital tools have a postive benefit on student writing with some concern about informal language appearing in formal writing.

  • Google Reader shuts off tomorrow, use Google Takeout and Reader is Dead to backup

    Tomorrow Google Reader shuts off, have you grabbed your data? The easiest way to backup your subscriptions from Google Reader is to use Google Takeout. This will give you a .zip file with a lot of data, including a subscriptions.xml which you can import into any RSS reader that accepts an OPML file.

    This is fine for your list of subscriptions, but I have been using Google Reader as a particular search engine, allowing me to search for items that I have read. I lost this ability with Google Takeout, but then I came across Reader is Dead. Mihai Parparita has created a couple of scripts that back up not only your subscriptions, but also all the items in Google Reader. For me, it was 928,981 items to be downloaded.

    Under OS X the script ran right out of the box. If you are on Windows, you will need to install Python first.

  • My summer plans 2013

    I’m not going to let a little thing like summer already being 3 weeks in the past to stop me from making a few goals on what I want to do this summer. 🙂 And since I’m more likely to accomplish things if I write them down, I decided to post them here for all to see and to also keep me on track.

    1. Read three novels: The Great Gatsby, Catching Fire, and To Kill a Mockingbird. I usually get so caught up with non-fiction (including all my RSS feeds) that I don’t read as much fiction as I should. There really isn’t any particular reason for reading these, except for the fact that two of them have movies in 2013.
    2. Write an interactive fiction game in Inform 7. Interactive fiction may be somewhat of a dead genre but I think it’s a fascinating way to create a story. I bought Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 by Aaron Reed in September of 2010. I think it’s about time to put it to use!
    3. Create a Little Free Library. These are the book equivalent of take a penny/leave a penny.
    4. Finish my super secret web tool…. 🙂

    Is there anything you’re doing this summer?