Welcome to the Koala Bites Newsletter

Online Tutor Topics Especially Koala Go

This newsletter is intended to be a collection point for information, tips and tricks, rants and raves, hopes and dreams and maybe even some news. 

This past week I spent a lot of time building in Playground, so that’s what I wrote articles about.

As the newsletter is longer than I would like it to be, I am going to try publishing twice a week.

⭐️⭐️In this issue⭐️⭐️

• Koala Teachers Family weekly recap

• Chinese New Year Playground by Teacher Dawn

• Emojis in sticky notes

• Space themed movie set

Did you miss it?😿📜⏮️

This week in Koala Teachers Family

Since the Koala Teachers Family group is so active you might have missed some important posts, here is my short list of what I consider to be the most important posts from the last week or so, in no particular order, except the first one, IT IS GOLD DO NOT SKIP IT! Click on any of the screenshots to visit the Facebook post.

Playground tips 🛝💍♴

Emojis in sticky notes🤷🏻‍♂️

Emoji use in sticky notes was first brought to my attention by Emily Radecki (she is always finding cool stuff and sharing it), she made a post about it, which I’m not sure many people saw. That seems to be one weakness of a busy Facebook group, stuff gets quickly shuffled way down the page before you might have a chance to read it.

Anyway, sticky notes will accept emojis, the problem is that most of them are really not useable. Most of the picture ones you would want to use are just a monochrome blur.

But some of them, mostly the symbols, work just fine. 

and as you can see, in the math symbols category there are a few different fonts, some work and some are just too blurry. You have to try them to find out.

Wow! that’s cool, how can I do that?

Well, I can only speak to using macOS, but I access the emoji menu by pressing the Control, Command and Spacebar keys at the same time which pulls up the menu pictured above. I usually have to double click on the emoji I want, and sometimes I get two…oh well.

I did brief testing with action zones and they seem to work normally, you can also mix them with regular text. So start experimenting! I want to see what everyone comes up with.

In case you didn’t already know, I love sticky notes, so expect to see more uses for them in the future.

Koala Go Marketplace🏬🛝🇨🇳

Chinese New Year 

This is a timely holiday themed playground by Teacher Dawn. I had an opportunity to tour this one and it’s well thought out and organized, tons of activities, good usage of the playground tools including sound. You click on the story characters who speak to you and direct you through the various activities and rooms. You progress through all the tasks for the day and finally end up in a nighttime scene with stars and fireworks!! She has 3 versions of this Playground for different student levels. Click on the presentation below to see more about it.

If you would like to have your playground presented in Koala Bites

Playground projects 🛝🃏👽

Space themed movie set

This project all started when I wasn’t happy with how the sky looked from my first spaceship project.

I needed to find a way to get rid of the water or at least block my view of it, easier said than done. Eventually I came around to the idea of a movie set like design. Using images or sticky notes or both to control what is seen. Just like a movie set does.

As per usual I started building using one of my templates, Pyramid Escape. I rebuilt the pyramid as a hollow ziggurat (stepped pyramid), this gave me plenty of enclosed space to make my spaceship set, hiding it in plain sight.

I had been experimenting for awhile with the blackest, darkest rooms I could create and the black sticky notes are the blackest thing we have. Another fun fact about black sticky notes is that they don’t have a visible border, which will be important later.

Ok, so now I have a great big, very, very dark room to build a spaceship in, but where are the stars? 

I’m surprised it was so easy, but 2 tries later I had a pattern of stars by just filling the sticky note with random spaces, periods , and the occasional asterisk. It turned out better than I expected.

So now I didn’t have just one star pattern but several as the sticky notes can be rotated. Not only that but the lack of visible border meant that I could shrink the notes and layer them to create the illusion of more depth.

Anyhow, “the proof is in the pudding” as they say. How did it turn out?

Click the above presentation where I tear down the walls of the ziggurat to expose it’s inner secrets… including details of the spaceship. In a later issue I will show you more of this unfinished project and how I made working transporters for this spaceship! Until then…Fly safe o7

Submissions 🎁👽👍🏻

Submissions

If you have an article or how-to video or playground launch you would like to share in this newsletter, click the button and send me an email to discuss it.

Bye-bye👋✌️😘

Well that’s it for this issue