Teaching & Learning Page:
Web Pages:
So many paper airplane designs at this repository of paper airplane designs on Foldnfly.com.
https://river-runner-global.samlearner.com/
https://river-runner-global.samlearner.com/?lng=174.5657372319875&lat=-36.869002932589716
https://virtualvacation.us/guess
Geography quiz game
To play online, you are shown a first-person view of walking through a city, and you have to guess what city in the world you are in. You get points depending on how close you are and how fast you recognise the place. You can play against yourself or other players, and you can narrow the scope.
The game also works as a virtual vacation because inhabiting someone else’s walk is weirdly comforting. A related game, “GeoGuessr”, drops you into a random place on Google Street View, usually not in the city. Here you can look around in all directions on your own “walk” and control your speed and path. (The free version requires signup.) Some people take this challenge very seriously and there are YouTube channels that follow some of the master navigators, like the champ GeoWizard. The lightning speed of his detective work is unbelievable and as entertaining as magic.
https://www.tpoty.com/tpoty-winners-galleries/
Techie Tips:
Make Siri More Patient
Does Siri rush you when you are trying to get your words out? Don’t worry — it happens to the best of us. Thankfully, iOS 18 lets you adjust how long Siri waits before cutting in. Follow the below steps to fix this.
- Open Settings, scroll to Accessibility, and tap Siri.
- Find Siri Pause Time and pick an option. If you need a bit more time, go with Longest.
This tweak is perfect if you tend to pause mid-sentence, whether you are gathering your thoughts or distracted by a pet doing something ridiculous. It is one of those small changes that makes Siri feel less like a nagging assistant and more like a patient friend.
Turn on Automatic Verification for Captcha
Captchas can be a real pain in the you-know-where. You are trying to browse and are asked to identify bicycles or traffic lights in blurry photos. With Automatic Verification in iOS 18, that hassle disappears.
- Open Settings, and tap your name at the top.
- Select Sign-In & Security and find Automatic Verification.
- Tap it, then make sure the switch is on.
Now, iOS will verify you in the background, skipping those irritating puzzles on websites and apps. This small change saves you time and sanity — no more squinting at questionable images to prove you are not a bot.
Sketchplanations :
Any success takes one in a row.
Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more. Over and over until the end, then it's one in a row again.
— Matthew McConaughey
From the book Greenlights
Big things start small. It's easy to get caught up in trying to do everything at once, but you have to start somewhere. You don't need to complete the whole row today. Every sustained success starts with the first one.
Sketchplanations started as one in a row.
After the first few successes, the power of streaks can take over.
The power of streaks — achieving something on a schedule without missing a slot — has a remarkable pull over us when it comes to helping us get things done.
As Seth Godin points out, streaks turn an activity into a game. While we may have started out with the intention simply of completing the activity, our continued motivation can transfer to simply be the motivation of keeping the streak going.
If you’re into streaks or want to give them a try to achieve something yourself, you might like the Streaks app (which is how I knew I’d done 2 years without missing), Austin Kleon’s 30-day challenge, or the simple power of one-a-day .
Streaks can also have a dark side: if you break the chain you can think it’s not worth getting started again. For that reason, I like James Clear’s advice to never miss twice.
Feedback analysis is a technique to improve judgment and discover your strengths. It could hardly be more simple:
- Write down what you think will happen whenever you make a key decision.
- In 9–12 months, compare what you predicted against what has happened.
- Repeat.
How does Feedback Analysis help?
I learned about feedback analysis from management consultant Peter Drucker in the small Harvard Business Review read Managing Oneself. He argues that we can only make our most significant contributions when we act from our strengths. Most people don't know their strengths, so the first step is to discover them. Feedback analysis helps you do this.
Feedback analysis reveals your strengths by showing you where you are right in your predictions and which of your intended actions achieve what you hoped. It also shows you your weaknesses, where your expectations are consistently wrong, and where your actions fall short.
Drucker suggests, "First and foremost, concentrate on your strengths. Put yourself where your strengths can produce results."
The Opportunity to do What I do Best Every Day
One of my favourite self-management reads is Strengthsfinder 2.0 by Tom Rath. It also argues that we have the most significant impact, not when we focus on fixing areas where we are weak but when we can make full use of our strengths.
The five greatest strengths I learned from that book are valuable for me to reflect on today. In fact, Sketchplanations is in some way a reflection of this:
- Ideation – you can probably tell I am drawn to and full of ideas.
- Achiever - consistently creating and moving on.
- Relator - okay, less so this one, unless it's relating through writing and sharing. Being a relator is about building strong 1:1 relationships.
- Learner - I am always adding to my stock of concepts.
- Focus - making space to stay on task and get things done.
I like to ask myself and my team members: "Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?" Then, we get the best out of ourselves and others.
Examples of Feedback Analysis
Some situations where you might put feedback analysis into action:
- Taking a new job
- Hiring a new teammate
- Moving house
- Getting a petLaunching a new product
- Taking a course or learning a new skill
- Making predictions for your year
Write your "Drucker Memo"
Dan Pink has a 3-minute video summary of this technique in his Pinkcast. He says it's useful for at least 3 reasons:
- It helps you see your blind spots.
- It's a great way to understand your strengths.
- It makes him a little bolder—after being consistently a little pessimistic in expectations, it caused him to try more new things.
Dan says he takes a moment to write his expectations in his "Drucker memo" when beginning each new project. He then files it away and schedules a reminder in 6 months to take a look and see if his expectations are accurate. Simple.
Have you got any big decisions coming up? Maybe give feedback analysis a try.
Article:
I have a theory that four original languages are embedded in us at a DNA level:
Music
Movement - including dance and sports
Visual Language
Story-Telling.
I deeply believe in the power of story to engage and cement learning. Here is an article on how to be an expert storyteller.
How To Become An Incredible Storyteller
A good story pulls us in, makes us hurt, and we love it every time. In fact, we crave it. We pay for it, time and time again, in the form of a Netflix subscription, a movie theatre ticket, or a Prime video purchase.
“The greatest story commandment is: Make me care.” —
Andrew Stanton, Pixar filmmaker and writer
Every good writer takes in creative masterpieces all of the time, asking themselves, over and over, what it is that they need to do to create work that’s compelling.
#1: Start small
The best stories start out as the simplest and most common ideas.
Anne of Green Gables is about an orphan, and so is Star Wars. Rocky and Creed are about a boxer. All of our favourite characters, old and new, are just people. (Or, you know, whatever creature they are that has a human mind and personality.)
“All good ideas start out as bad ideas, that’s why it takes so long.” —
Steven Spielberg
Even films like the latest Guardians of the Galaxy film have such a basic and simple premise that you can so clearly see. It’s a story about a creature, Rocket, discovering who he is despite the odds stacked against him. Everything else is just extra.
For Dungeons and Dragons players, maybe this looks like spinning a die and seeing what you end up with for your list of character traits out of the handbook.
One of my favourite childhood films, The Fox and the Hound, is simply a story about two unlikely friends — much like many other childhood knockout films.
Every great character starts as a list of character qualities or a description, a role that they play. Good writers stick around long enough to turn them into real characters — but aren’t afraid to start small.
We want intricate and wild, but we also want simple. We may not be simple-minded, but we’re more simple at heart than we’d like to think.
#2: Lean into the basic secret of life — people change people
Show how your characters build each other up and change each other. Every good story has a protagonist being a different person (or creature, whatever they are) at the end of their story.
Marlin is a more carefree and unanxious father at the end of Finding Nemo, with some new friends and a perspective on life. At the end of Remember The Titans, the characters have become men, a true family of brothers who know no racial divide.
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline
In one of my favourite shows of all time, Girl Meets World, social studies teacher Corey Matthews tells his students the following basic secret of life: People change people. That’s the secret. Through some magical means, we inspire one another.
It’s like Augie says at the end of Wonder — “everyone deserves a standing ovation once in their life”, a chance to stand in front of peers and strangers and to know that they have somehow made a difference.
Good storytellers tell stories about people changing people. At our core, we want to know we could change in the same way — and maybe deep in our hearts, we know we should.
“You don’t have an idea until you can use the words ‘but’, ‘except’, ‘and then…’”
— Aaron Sorkin, playwright and West Wing showrunner
Every good story has some element at the end where the main character looks back, and the proof of change is shown. Maybe they go home, back to their home planet or hometown, or reconnect with someone from the story's beginning.
#3: Show the significance of the mundane
The writer of Ecclesiastes was right — there really is nothing new under the sun.
In my novel, I decided to go a little deeper when I was crafting the ending and realized that my main character should have an interaction with her father. Throughout the story, he loses his rights, and she ends up being adopted. But her ending up happy with her new family didn’t make sense, it didn’t feel real.
“Never laugh at live dragons.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien
But her having a simple meetup in a restaurant with her estranged father? Those are the people you might be walking by today when you take your lunch break or the duo you pass on your drive to your vacation for the weekend with your family.
Stories take ordinary moments and show us how much meaning, emotion, and impact they can have on characters — and, subsequently, ourselves.
Last night, I was reading An Old Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott, and I wept bitterly. I did so not because the moment was so extraordinary or because Polly, the main character, had survived any giant journey to get to the moment.
“In order to write about life first you must live it.”
— Ernest Hemingway
She simply walked upstairs to a girl who needed her empathy and support, and they shared one of the most emotionally honest moments I’ve ever read in a novel.
As you’re growing your storytelling prowess, don't be afraid to lean into the calm and still moments. Maybe it’s a Godfather-style dinner, a Top Gun: Maverick touch football game on the beach, or a moment waiting for their parents to pick them up like in A Fault In Our Stars.
We don’t demand much as readers and experiencers of stories. Sometimes, all we need is a simple and mundane moment to show us something incredible.
Andrew Stanton had it right: You have to make people care.
At the end of the day, that’s what a good storyteller has to do. The story has to be reminiscent enough of real life that the reader can no longer distinguish between fact and fiction. Make it real. Make it matter. And you’ll have your readers hooked.
Book Recommendation:
The compelling, groundbreaking guide to creative writing that reveals how the brain responds to storytelling.
Stories shape who we are. They drive us to act out our dreams and ambitions and mould our beliefs.
Storytelling is an essential part of what makes us human. So, how do master storytellers compel us?
In The Science of Storytelling, award-winning writer and acclaimed teacher of creative writing Will Storr applies dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to our myths and archetypes to show how we can write better stories, revealing, among other things, how storytellers—and also our brains—create worlds by being attuned to moments of unexpected change.
Will Storr’s superbly chosen examples range from Harry Potter to Jane Austen to Alice Walker, Greek drama to Russian novels to Native American folk tales, King Lear to Breaking Bad to children’s stories.
With sections such as “The Dramatic Question,” “Creating a World,” and “Plot, Endings, and Meaning,” as well as a practical, step-by-step appendix dedicated to “The Sacred Flaw Approach,” The Science of Storytelling reveals just what makes stories work, placing it alongside such creative writing classics as John Yorke’s Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey into Story and Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing. Enlightening and empowering.
