Category: Technology

Another Casualty of the Free-Only Economy

Geddit, a response-system app will be turning off its servers on June 30th, 2015. I heard about this software about a year ago when I sat down next... Read more

Student Rubrics with Google Forms and docappender

Every other month, we give students an argumentative writing prompt which is then scored against a standard rubric. One of our school goals is to i... Read more

Because We Can Doesn’t Mean We Should

This weekend, our local over-the-air movie stations had a marathon of classic monster/science fiction movies. I watched a bit of King Kong (1976) w... Read more

Are We Already in a Tech Dystopia?

Featured image creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Wonderlane I apologize for the click-baity title, but I think it helps get t... Read more

Why Net Neutrality Matters to Schools

A little history Big, important ideas can often be overlooked because of how boring they sound to the average listener. Remember SOPA and PIPA a fe... Read more

Why You Shouldn’t Care When Schools Throw iPads Away

In case you missed it, there were two big stories in the past two weeks about schools selling or destroying their student devices. The Atlantic pos... Read more

You’ve Got the Wrong Idea

Do a quick Google search for “disrupt education.” It seems 2013 in particular was a boom for companies looking to disrupt the current education sys... Read more

It’s a Twitter Robot!

Update 8/20/2014 8:30 AM: I have deactivated the script for this Twitter bot. It was fun, and the process is below if you want to read more. But, t... Read more

What Does Connection Look Like?

October was Connected Educator’s Month. (Soapbox moment: I can’t wait until we can get rid of these silly “awareness months.” Okay, I’m done). I’ve... Read more

A “Radical New Teaching Model” That is Missing the Point

Wired business had an article come out earlier this month about a small school in Mexico that saw huge gains in learning because of some computers ... Read more

Is Khan Academy the Next Generation LMS?

Since 2011, the online resource of thousands of educational videos has been heralded as the “savior of education” and a model for flipped classroom... Read more

TeachLIVE and the Absurdity of “Progress”

I came across something so absurd, and so initially shocking, I almost thought it was a joke. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, w... Read more

Bunching vs Wrapping

I’m thinking a lot about teaching lately. Maybe because it’s because I’ve been out of the classroom for over three months, or because I’m planning ... Read more

Screencasting on Chromebooks

Update 7/2/2015 – An older update (this news came out a few months back) but it’s worth noting that some Wacom tablets are now supported on Chromeb... Read more

Using Video to Liberate Class Time – Cross Post

I originally wrote this for the INDOE 28 Days of Learning blog as part of Digital Learning Month. This is a cross post of that article. I removed t... Read more

Community Building via QR

One of my new favorite stops in my morning reading is the Fast Company series. I subscribe to the Design blog, but I also browse the Create and Exi... Read more

Adaptive Science Curriculum

I’ve been following Dan Meyer for about 15 months. I don’t teach math, but the way he talks about teaching math makes me want to teach it. If you’r... Read more

Essential Tools for Learning

I’ve been thinking a lot about tools and space lately. What digital tools work well in my class? What analog tools are necessary for chemistry? Wha... Read more

Stop SOPA and PIPA

I think this is my first ever politically-based post. But, I feel so strongly about it, I couldn’t think of a better way to share my thoughts on th... Read more

Commercials and Education

I saw this commercial over the weekend: I think this commercial shows two classrooms. One class uses computers as worksheets. The second uses compu... Read more

Save Our Schools

Last weekend I had the privilege of attending EdCamp: Grand Rapids hosted by the extraordinary Ron Houtman. About 100 educators from all over Michi... Read more

Video is Not the Answer

The flipped class has been coming up more and more in discussions and blog posts recently. My guess is that it has something to do with Salman Khan... Read more

Student Blogs: What I Learned

Today I finally had the chance to get my students their blogs. After weeks of trial and error getting the site to work and email after email with ... Read more

Google +1 Buttons

As I've been playing with Google+ over the last day or two, I've been figuring out some of the nuances reading articles from other bloggers and eve... Read more

Google+ First Impressions

I know there have been a deluge of Google+ blog posts written in the past 3 weeks or so, but I’m going to hop on the bandwagon this morning and giv... Read more

Summer Thoughts

It is the morning of July 8th and I just now have time to sit down with some coffee and put some thoughts down that have been flying through my hea... Read more

Don’t Miss the Forest

Any time the iPad is mentioned, mouths start watering and eyes well with tears as they think about the possibilities…myself included. The iPad has... Read more

Fear of the Cell Phone

I have to be honest…I almost posted this yesterday, about an hour after I posted about the fishbowl discussion. But, I decided to bite my tongue a... Read more

Terminal Velocity

This week, my students are about to finish unit 7, thermochemistry. Looking back one year, I was a little bit further ahead (in terms of content) b... Read more

An Argument for the Presence of a Teacher

I came across a very interesting post this morning from Dr. Lee Skallerup Bessette at College Ready Writing entitled “What Ed Tech Can’t Do.” She ... Read more

Looking forward to Web 3.0

I recently read a blog post that talked about “Web 3.0” and how it has already begun to move in. (I can’t find the link, but I’ll update when I tra... Read more

Open-source fever

I’ve developed a fever over the past week. I found a program called MacPorts, an open-source project aimed at making other open-source projects av... Read more

Jeopardy in class

I’ve written a lot lately about general chemistry, but I’m also using technology in my AP Chemistry class when I can work it in around all of the p... Read more

115th Anniversary of the X-Ray

Yesterday was the 115th anniversary of the discovery of the X-Ray. Physics Buzz, a blog run by PhysicsCentral.com, ran an interesting post on the ... Read more

Moving to Moodle

I’ve been running my course thus far via Google sites (which I love). The site itself is easy to set-up, although the customization can take some ... Read more

Get in touch

Comments are always open. You can get in touch by sending me an email at brian@ohheybrian.com