ohhey[blog]

Fixing Helix Colors on a Chromebook

2024-02-21T20:21:00-05:00

Success! I've been using Helix on my Chromebook for almost a year and I was finally able to get editor themes working correctly. Helix has a great selection of themes but I was never able to get them working on this little machine. I had to install from source, which was a little dicey given how small the hard drive is and how low-power mid-range Chromebooks are in general. The development container works well but the terminal emulator on Chrome isn't well documented and I kept running into an error any time I tried to set the theme:

Unsupported theme: theme requires true color support.

Long story short, Helix does some kind of internal check for color support in the terminal and, for some reason, it would throw a false negative. I finally found a discussion thread in the repo from 2023 showing that you can set the editor section of the config file to override the auto check:

[editor]
true-color = true

Funnily enough, another ChromeOS user posted in the repo's discussions about ChromeOS specificallywith the same answer being given. I wish it hadn't taken me this long to figure out, but here we are.

It's still not my favorite for programming, but this little Chromebook can do a lot more than it seems on the surface. This is one more box checked off on my list and a mystery finally solved.

Slow Going

2024-02-19T10:17:00-05:00

I've learned to focus on slowing this down rather than fighting to accelerate all the time. It comes from living away from places. It comes from taking my work as it comes rather than tracking productivity like I used to. I'm appreciating the time it takes so do things instead of constantly tweaking my rhythms to squeeze as much "value" out of every minute. Sometimes the value is in the time between starting and finishing a project.

When I was doing technical and organizational work, I fell into the productivity black hole. I was constantly trying to find systems that would make me just a little more productive - a few more tasks tracked and a few more jobs done. I did good work but I felt a compulsion to show just how much I got done. I logged and planned and at the end, filled pages of books with stuff I don't care about.

I don't have these notebooks anymore.

This kernel of popcorn took nine months to eat. It has the story of our family choosing to plant something new. The dirt of the garden under our nails when we planted the seeds. Water on our skin from setting up the sprinkler. Husks in our hands. The smell in the air.

All of that takes time. I have this written down in my new notebook.

I Hope The Expanse Returns

2024-02-13T13:25:00-05:00

I just finished watching the final series of The Expanse on Amazon Prime last night and I'm really hoping they continue the story. If you're not familiar with the series, it is a TV adaptation of a series of novels of the same name written by James S. A. Corey (Daniel Abram and Ty Frank). It's set a couple hundred years into the future and centers on the tensions between the people of Earth, Mars, and essentially an underclass living in the asteroid belt and outer planets who rely on the inner planets to survive. I've read and listened to the books a number of times because they're just that good as a return-to book when I need something familiar.

The TV series started on Syfy and was then dropped after three seasons. Amazon Prime picked it up and ran three more seasons before ending at the end of book 6, Babylon's Ashes. The TV series departs from the books in several areas, but more out of necessity than creative choices. For instance, the novels are very realistic in how how big space is, so there are several parts of books where the crew is in transit for months. You can't do that on TV. There are some changes in characters and their roles, but that's more because the books feature dozens of people. Each book in the novel series introduces secondary characters that go along with the main crew. You can't keep introducing new faces in a TV series.

That said, the TV series does a great job of adapting the huge universe created by the books. Without giving much away, there is a large gap of time between books six and seven in the novels that would make an adaptation difficult - Screnrant has a good breakdown of some of the challenges. The frustrating part is that season six left of with just enough hanging fruit that it could be started up again if the conditions were right.

If you've not seen the show, I would recommend reading the books first. I'm not a "the book is always better" kind of person but the depth of story in the books helps you appreciate how the show was made. The showrunners did a good job of telling a coherent, captivating, and human story in a very large, very complicated universe.

Delightful New Feeds

2024-02-06T15:05:00-05:00

I took some time this morning to go through ooh.directory and add some personal blogs to my feed reader. Nothing in particular, just things that were updated in the last month and caught my attention while I combed through the lists page by page. There are two that have stood out immediately looking through the backlog:

A Man and His Hoe. An anonymous man writing from Washington state about chickens and the weather. It's great to read someone who has similar perspectives and just to get day to day updates.
My Granddad is Keeping Busy. Another daily site where Anne posts her grandfather's journal entries from 50 years ago. There are 40 (!) pages of posts so far. The first post was published in January 2023 so it appears this one will be around for a while.

For a long time, I'd only subscribed to blogs where people hadd A Message and I'm looking forward to meandering again.

"Ungrading" an Elective Class

2024-02-06T14:08:00-05:00

In my elective class (environmental science), I've moved toward using "concept checks" at the end of each unit in favor of a traditional test. I have a Google Doc template with several prompts (usually 6-8) related to the concepts we've been working on in class. At the bottom of the test, students reflect on the learnin objectives set at the start of the unit and then grade their own understanding.

I like this method because it asks students to verbalize what they know and apply concepts in more detail than we normally do in class. As I read, I leave comments in the doc, prompting with followup questions or asking them to provide more detail on claims they make in writing. After the feedback stage, I send it back and students are able to make revisions.

While it has worked well, I don't think I'm doing a good job of preparing students for the depth of response I would like to see. They're able to use their notes and resources to form their responses, but many times, it turns into a definition word salad and I don't see application or justification of ideas. My feedback step pushes them to justify more, but I would love to see that happen on the first attempt.

Ideally, I would be able to give a single grade at the end of the semester representing their growth as science consumers and communicators. I'm not 100% sure how to do that along with tracking progress across individual units of study. I don't know if that's important or if it is my own perception of what should be shown in the gradebook. I just know that grades are something that trouble me and I'm trying to find a way to play both sides of the line.

January 2024 Reading

2024-02-01T10:12:00-05:00

A goal this year is to read more books. I finished four books this month:

Pastoral Song: An Inheritance - James Rebanks Rebanks is a regenerative farmer in England and this book is about his care for the fell farms in northern England. He writes like James Herriot in this memoir, lamenting the "advances" of modern farming as he works to keep hold of his family's traditional approaches.

Under Alien Skies: A Signseer's Guide to the Universe - Phil Plait Phil is an astronomer and writer of the Bad Astronomy newsletter/social media accounts. He explores various areas in our galaxy and explains how you would actually perceive some of these places if we could go there. The book is full of vivid imagery built from what we understand via observations mixed with some scientific fiction narrative worked in.

Leave the World Behind - Rumaan Alam This is a new suspense/disaster novel that I picked up because I watched the Netflix trailer. It's a slow-build suspense novel that has a ton of weird stuff happen to two unfortunate families stuck together. The premise was interesting but the characters felt a little flat to me.

The Sheperd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape - James Rebanks This is more of a memoir than Pastoral Song was as Rebanks works his way through a growing season as a shepherd. This is filled with lessons from his grandfather and father as he wrestles what it means to be his own farmer making decisions as a traditional farmer in a modern landscape. It also reads very much like James Herriott.

I'll keep posting here but I'm also keeping track on LibraryThing if you're there and would like to connect.

Winter Longing

2024-01-31T07:20:00-05:00

January is at an end and I'm longing for more sunlight. The days are definitely longer, but they're still too short to really have appreciable time after school to be outside and decompress.

We tapped maple trees yesterday on the farm. Our two families were working together in the woods to take advantage of a coming warm streak. The sap will run this week with temperatures forecast in the 40's, but still cold at night. It's not as early as last year which is good, but it's still probably earlier than it should be overall. Climate change is pushing our seasons earlier which means we need to be ready to grow sooner. My body is happy to have some warmer weather but my mind knows that it comes at a cost. Maybe not one we can pay.

My bees are still alive. I took a moment this week to put my ear against the hive. I could hear their hum through the wood - no stethescope needed. They know how to take care of themselves...I just try to give them a place they want to occupy.

There is still a lot of winter yet left. But one can hope.

Ogallala Aquifer Lesson Resources

2024-01-19T15:15:00-05:00

We're wrapping up a case study on the Ogallala Aquifer this week and I'm happy with the kind of exploration students have been able to do. Original credit for the base materials go to my sister-in-law who graciously shared all of her environmental science materials with me once I found out I would be teaching it for the first time this year.

The Prelude

Students took some time to define the difference between groundwater and surface water. We did a large watershed mapping exercise (that will probably be another blog post) showing how water moves across different regions of the world downhill toward oceans. Then, we took some time to talk about freshwater uses before moving into discussing how areas without major rivers get freshwater resources.

The Aquifer

The Ogallala Aquifer is the largest freshwater deposit in the United States (175,000 sqaure miles in eight states). Starting in the mid 1900's, plains states farmers began pumping water from the aquifer as an irrigation source. I showed this short documentary as a discussion starter for the main portion of the exploration.

Expand and Explore

Following the video, I gave students a Google Doc template with expansion and exploration questions. Because environmental science overlaps science with human experience, these explorations look at the science behind what is happening as well as social, economic, and political implications. Students need to build their own understanding through research as they work to apply ideas and concepts to the scientific base.

This is also a great time to introduce data manipulation skills. The US Geological Survey publishes open-access data sources on all kinds of projects, one of which is the High Plains Water-Level Monitoring Study. This is field data for well depths which tap into the Ogallala Aquifer across all eight states. I grabbed the full TSV for 2013 from the published data page and then worked with students to create a scatter plot showing average well depth for each state that year. They then worked on some data analysis using their graphs.

The document linked below has two graphs already created, one showing the average depth to the water surface for each state as well as one showing the average water depth as well as the average well depth. I asked students to predict which state was most at risk of losing water first based on the water surface depth alone and, after some discussion, they realized that the aquifer might not be uniform depth. They also discussed topography differences which would make the water surface further into the crust. We then generated the second graph to show the average volume of water in each state which led to more thorough analysis.

Bigger Perspective

Data on charts is good for interpretation skills but I wanted them to be able to conceptualize each row on that sheet as an actual place with an actual well. Using the same USGS data, I threw together a custom Google Map and colored each marker in a range according to the depth of water below the surface of the ground (deeper wells are red).

The Endgame

We happen to live in an area rife with water thanks to the Great Lakes so we don't really think about water as a scarce commodity. We're finishing the unit with pollution and its effect on the Great Lakes' (sidebar: The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Eagen is wonderful and will probably appear in this unit soon) ecology and economy along with a reflection on their own personal water use habits. Some of my students come from farms with radial irrigation equipment, so I'm curious to see what connections come from this study.

Links

If you'd like copies of anything, you can get them here:

Thinking About Rubrics for Feedback

2024-01-18T10:05:00-05:00

A new semester means a fresh gradebook and more time to think about how I'm actually giving feedback and reporting progress. I've been a user of the four-point rubric for a long time and, of course, I'm rethinking that entire approach. There are some benefits to the four point scale which are outlined particularly well by Robert Talbert's post on point everything toward feedback (my emphasis):

The biggest and most central problem is that marks are often used as an implicit form of feedback. But as feedback, number- or letter-based marks are not helpful. As I wrote in my previous post, the primary purpose of feedback is iteration. In order to be helpful, feedback should convey information back to the learner about their work that will be useful in crafting a next iteration of that work.

My standards rubric is essentially the EMRF model Robert discusses, but I've started wrestling with how to use a single point rubric as a method of driving students forwawrd. Single point rubrics remove the "score" component and would allow me to indiciate what a student needs to improve (they have not met the standard) as well as what they can do to expand (go beyond basic implementation or demonstration) their understanding.

The four-point rubric gives me some leeway in how to calculate that score because each item is entered numerically into the gradebook. At the end of each unit, I calculate a score out of four as the most recent mark + the highest mark divided by two. I like this because recent effort counts and students always benefit from their best performance, as opposed to a traditional average where they're always penalized for their worst performance.

I struggle with calculations because the last performance should be the most indiciative of skill development, but with so many conflicting factors involved in assessment, looking at growth over time is important to me. A single point rubric would make the grading faster and more specific to the student but would make my collection and analysis of progress more difficult. Alas.

I do have a site where students can track their progress over time and look at accumulated feedback. The idea is that they are checking that (for their digital assignments at least) to make sure they're making progress. On my end, I generate a simple sparkline to show trends. That isn't shown to students, though. Perhaps adding that small indicator would help me help them reflect on their own growth. Removing the point values entirely would allow them to focus on making their line move up rather than adding scores.

Tinnitus

2024-01-16T20:41:00-05:00

I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that I have a persistent case of tinnitus. Mine is a constant high-pitched ring in both ears that comes and goes in severity. Recently, it has been more noticable and I feel like it is starting to affect the way I perceive my surroundings.

In my younger days, I was often at loud basement concerts or similar shows. Loud music was also in my headphones and later car. This habit continues through college and into my younger married years. I didn't really become serious about protecting my ears until 2020 when we started building the house. Since then, I've tried to keep a pair of ear plugs on hand for every farm job or construction project.

I can't deny that it has gotten progressively more invasive. I particularly notice the ringing early in the morning and in the evening when I'm trying to settle into bed. If I'm busy or otherwise occupied, I don't notice the ring as much. My early reading on brain training can reduce the impact of tinnitus on day to day life and if I'm persistent in protecting myself, i can prevent further damage.

This is a lot of self-diagnosis, but much of the tinnitus diagnosis is based on self reporting. I need to schedule a time with my doctor for an actual audiology exam to see what frequencies I'm missing (if any). I'm also planning on writing about my experience more here.

What's With My Domain Name?

2024-01-13T13:45:00-05:00

I was perusing some blogs today and saw a post from Juha-Matti Santala in which he described his domain and others who inspired him to write his story. I've felt a little bit of a dry spell in writing, so here's mine.

I was at a conference in 2011 where I met some technology-focused teachers for the first time. Following my session, I was encouraged to buy my domain and start a website so I could "share my message." (In retrospect, that was a tainted way of thinking about how to use the Internet, but that's for a different post.)

Brian Bennett, unfortinately, is not an uncommon name. The first search result is Brian Bennett, the famous English drummer and pianist. The domain brianbennett.com is parked and for sale for an affordable $14,000 USD, so I had to come up with other options.

Since my initial focus was on marketing my message, I really wanted to stick with my full name if possible, so I grabbed brianbennett.org as the closest alternative. I threw WordPress on a BlueHost account and quickly built an okay website trying to market myself as an educational technology expert at the ripe age of 24.

Fast forward a couple years to 2014. I was working with a company and some friends started making the Family Guy "oh hey Brian" joke when I walked over to their building. It sort of caught on and I started noticing it a lot more. A quick domain search showed that it wasn't registered and wasn't too expensive. Since it was more of a gimmick domain, I threw a blank page up with a clip from Family Guy before finally taking time to learn how to build my own websites from scratch. The Wayback Machine has one of my earilest sites archived so you can still get a taste of what my early attempts at web development looked like. The blog link sill pointed to my brianbennett.org domain, but that was not long for this world.

The Vibe

I think ohheybrian.com as a domain helped me capture a little more of my personality. When I started, I was solely thinking about how to be A Person of Knolwedge on the Internet, which meant a name-based domain as well as a particular level of seriousness that I look back at now with a little bit of embarrassment. Since committing fully to the name, I've felt much more comfortable experimenting and letting my own personality come out a little more.

For a long time, my site was a very spartan landing page that had a little bit of snark about not wanting guest posts. It was a swing too far in the other direction, maybe as a pushback against the marketing tack I'd started with. I think my current design has captured the blend, keeping a very minimal design and aesthetic but not so bare that people can't learn a little about me.

Maybe it's maturity and maybe it's just not caring quite so much about what people think of me when they visit my site, but nearly 10 years after purchasing ohheybrian.com, I think this one is here to stay.

Open for Comments

2024-01-02T22:55:00-05:00

Well, I did a thing. I built a little service to add comments back into my blog. This was a little bit of a project because I had to build a backend process to handle the comment database as well as update my blog templates to fetch, display, and allow for comment submissions.

Receiving Comments in Flask

I love Flask. It's easy to get anything up and running quickly and runs great. David and the whole Pallets team do a great job maintaining and building the platform and I just enjoy working in it.

I threw a new endpoint on my main domain which will take in comments from my blog. Because they're on different domains, I had to handle CORS by allowing requests from my blog to the endpoint. Once a comment comes in, nefarious input is cleaned with nh3 and then stored in a SQLite database.

I want to moderate any submissions, so everything is marked "pending" by default. This meant I needed a little dashboard to both view and update the approved flag on the submission. I ended up making a small user model which allows me to log into an admin area on the site to manage the comments. There aren't any relationships on the model right now, so it's really just taking them one at at time.

Sending Comments from a Static Page

I took this as an opportunity to learn about HTML custom elements. I followed a few helpful articles and used the MDN docs to get a little element together which is now part of the article markup generated by Pelican. The component is a small javascript file which fetches any comments for the current article and throws them into the DOM.

The hard part about dynamically loading content onto a static page, especially content that is specific to that page, is how to have a unique identifier. Luckily, I've managed to have unique post titles for everything, so the page slug becomes the point of reference. Starting now, when a post loads, a request is sent to the Flask application with the page slug and any approved comments are then sent back over the wire and loaded.

The component also includes a form to submit your thoughts. I use htmx which handles the form submission through AJAX. But, if you're browsing with Javascript disabled, you can still submit the form because it falls back to the HTML action declaration in the markup.

They're Only Comments

There is no point to this other than it's something I wanted to do. I got to learn a bunch about custom elements and spend some time getting my little corner of the web a little more the way I want it.

New Year, New Goals

2024-01-01T09:40:00-05:00

What better way to start 2024 than with a blog post. I finished 2023 with 86 blog posts which is far more than I've written in several years. I was a few short of the 100 Days of Offload challenge, so this will start me off on the 2024 adventure.

There are several things I hope to do this year - some professional, some personal. I'll revisit this post at the end of the year to see how I do.

In no particular order, this year I hope to:

Read 40 books. I used to read voraciously and I'm trying to rebuild the habit. Audiobooks count. I'm using LibraryThing to track my reading now (thanks to Alan Levine for the link to John Udell's post.)
✓ Add comments to this blog. I've got some work toward that goal finished, but it's no good if it's not published. (Published Jan 2, 2024).
Cut my phone use time down to ~1 hour per day. I'm going to use Digital Wellbeing to track and I will reflect periodically on my progress. The ultimate goal would be to switch back to a flip phone full time.
Ride my bike 150 miles. I'm not a cyclist by any means but I started doing local rides again last summer and I'd like to make it a more regular part of my leisure time. I'm using OpenTracks to track my rides.
Get two new courses approved for 2024-25. I'm hoping to teach a beginner computer science and advanced chemistry course next school year, but we have some work to do to build out the syllabus and course sequences.

These are just a few of my bigger goals - smaller ones will come and go, but these are the ones I'll come back to in 12 months.

Art Review 2023

2023-12-26T22:00:00-05:00

I had a soft goal of learning how to do some sketching and water color painting this year. I filled the small book I got last Christmas so I thought this would be a good time to share some of my favorites.

My first real attempt at painting mid January. This is our coat rack and various other hangable things. It had tons of folds and overlapping textures. I might have been wiser to start with a simpler subject.

A work trip took me to Detroit. The first day had brilliant blue skies, so I took a stab at some architectural sketching. Unfortunately, the pen bled when I added some color. Oh well.

This might be my favorite. In April, we took a trip to Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia. The live oak trees canopy a huge portion of the island and give so much texture and character to the island. We will definitely go back.

This shows that not trying for something in particular can lead to the best result. My wife and I were discussing our chicken coop and I managed this little sketch during our talk on the back of an envelope.

My brother-in-law's cow pasture is next to our house and during the summer I enjoy just watching them wander around. This pushed me to capture general shapes quickly while they ate their way past the house one evening.

This is a sketch from a photo of a winter cardinal that I did as practice before painting a small ornament for our tree. I like the character that came out.

This has definitely been a journey. I have many other failed and janky paintings in my book that will stay private to me and my family. I'm looking forward to learning more this coming year.

Downgrading Files for a Road Trip

2023-12-23T10:00:00-05:00

We have a trip to Kentucky coming up and for the first time in a while, we don't have a general-purpose iPad to use for some in-car entertainment. My wife and I used to say that we wouldn't rely on movies to get through trips because "we didn't do that growing up." But, people also used to take three weeks to ride across the country on horses and now we have airplanes.

I have a small collection of movies on flash drive, so we went to the local library (I love our library) and grabbed an in-car DVD player from their wonderful Library of Things which also had an option for SD or USB playback. I eagerly grabbed my flash drive and was met with "encoding not readable."

Turns out that this particular device only accepts MPEG1, MPEG2, or DivX. h.264 encodings would not work because it's old-ish. I also learned that most DVDs are encoded in MPEG2, so it makes sense that storage media would need to be in the same format.

It might be once or twice a year that I really need FFMpeg and it never fails to come through. It also seems that this is a common question and there are pages and pages of debate about what bitrate is best for which format - this turned into a three-hour deep dive and semi-live toot thread while I wrestled not only with encoding and wrapper formats but also max resolution (this particular device exptected a max of 720x576 pixels).

In the end I landed on this command:

ffmpeg -i file.mp4 -c:v libxvid -q:v 2 -q:a 2 -vf scale=720:-1 out.avi

This line does 4 things:

Take the input mp4 and convert it to the DivX encoding
Drop video and audio quality just a bit
Scale the video to a max of 720 pixels wide while keeping the height in proportion
Spit out a .avi file container the player can read

I'm running this all on a Chromebook, so encoding takes about the same amount of time it takes to watch the movie, so I'm pretty much keeping the computer open and running while we do other things around the house to get ready.

I am also acutely aware that I could run to the thrift store and get the same movies on DVD for $1 each and be set. But that's a much less interesting blog post.

Some Simple Security Chores

2023-12-22T08:28:00-05:00

I've self-hosted my website for years, first with Bluehost and then many happy years with Reclaim Hosting. In early 2023 I moved to a VPS with Linode to give myself some more flexibility in what I can make and run on the web. It's more hands-on and today I took a few minutes to update some firewall rules.

I glance at the "failed logins" log anytime I SSH into my server, but I rarely take time to think about what it actually means. Today is December 22. My last login was on December 19. In that time, there were over 1000 login attempts. It's not an enormous number (relative to other, more popular websites) but that's still a lot of tries to get in. I use a strong password and I have keys set up, but still.

I have fail2ban to help lock people out periodically. I've got pretty strict rules in place because I'm the only one logging in or out of this site. I had never gone through the logs, though, to see what was actually being captured. I found a fantastic, step by step guide on The Art of Web detailing how to analyze and interpret fail2ban logs and how to then set up IP address firewalll rules for the most persistent attackers.

I went through the guide, step by step, and identified which IP ranges were the most prevalent in the banned address logs. Then, using The Art of Web's subnet calculator, I was able to get an IP address for a range of IPs which were the most frequently used addresses.

Lastly, I added that range of addresses to iptables to reject any request from that range outright. No more jail time, it's a straight up ban.

The guide was extremely easy to follow and I'm planning on looking this over every couple of weeks as part of my regular update schedule. There are also some suggestions in the post for logging daily stats, and that may come into my routine as well.

Two Weeks Ahead: A Reflection

2023-12-20T14:02:00-05:00

Back in November, I wrote about steps I was taking to improve my lesson planning habits. Six weeks later, I'm reflecting back on how I improved and what I still need to get better at.

I was able (for the most part) to stay two weeks ahead in my planning. My materials were ready and I wasn't running to the copy room. I lost track a little around the Thanksgiving holiday, but I was still more organized than I'd been leading up to that break.
I have a binder with the last four units' notes, worksheets, and assessments put together. I made it a goal to catalog everything as I made it or used it with students so I have a spot to flip through next year as I prep materials. At the end of each unit, I went through with sticky notes and left reflective notes on things like how to lead into an assignment, other materials to have ready for that activity, or typos to fix for the next time.
My brain is starting to think differently. This week, I'm getting everything ready for our return in January. Copies are turned in and I'm prepping my slides so we can come back on the 8th with little to no stress about what we're doing.

My two goals for further improvement:

I find myself wanting to tweak papers leading up to the assignment. I have to set a "free date" for myself so I know when to stop tweaking and to just use what is ready this time around.
Don't re-create so much. A particular paper or handout might not fit my preference, but sometimes, you just need to use what's available and not put so much energy into essentially tweaking layout without making usability or helpfulness to students any better.

This has been a great semester. I'm tired, but very satisfied with the work we've done in class. I've seen a lot of growth in my students and they're seeing their successes as we spend time at a high-level looking over the scope of work for the final exam.

I Showed a Movie For a Final

2023-12-18T16:00:00-05:00

Sorry for the clickbait title, but I really did. My environmental science class just finished our unit on human populations and the affects it has on the environment along with the effects of social constructs, resource availability, and other factors on the population growth. Along with everything we've done so far this year on biodiveristy, resource allocation, and other ways we interact with the environment, it is the perfect time to watch Wall-E.

I normally don't like using movies in class because the chintzy worksheets that go with many are just busywork. This time, I'm putting a spin on the watching. Instead of completing a simple fill-in-the-blank page of very specific detail-oriented questions, I gave my class a prompt:

Take notes of themes or topics you notice that apply directly to the learning you've done so far this year. It can be any topic from any unit. When you notice something, add it as a bullet point in your doc. This will be the basis of your final synthesis where you discuss and describe your notes in detail for your final exam.

In other words, watch the movie and make a note when something looks familiar. Easy enough.

I want to see how students can synthesize information from a larger stretch of time. Wall-E is a fantastic resource for this class because it is a clear representation of what could happen if some of our trends don't change. Anything from pollution to overpopulation is fair game for the students and each one will have a different perspective and take on the content.

Vox captures this well in their 2017 retrospective:

...the film's genius is probably due to Stanton's [the director's] assiduous efforts to stay neutral. There are no familiar slogans or symbols easily identified with a politicized notion of the environment anywhere in Wall-E. Instead, the film paints a pretty stunning picture of the deleterious effects of letting two things continue unchecked: a society's insatiable need to consume (cheap products, entertainment, food, resources), and private industry's drive for profit when it overtakes public good.

Each unit so far has asked students to consider the human impact on the environment and this is an opportunity to see how they relate to a fictionalized version of a less-than-ideal future.

I haven't seen their notes yet, but the group was attentive and people were actually writing things down, which is an encouraging start. Hopefully this will be a strategy I can use again.

Lifesaver Chrome Extensions (for a Teacher)

2023-12-18T10:46:00-05:00

I'm procrastinating on finishing my final exam, so here are two Chrome extensions which make my life much, much easier.

Reader View for Chrome. This extension has been around since long before Chrome finally added a reader view but I still use it more than the native implementation. It strips images, adds, and CTA prompts from text and gives flexible formatting options. I can take an article and easily get down to a more readable piece of text to then use as a PDF or to print for students. It even includes options for adding multiple columns so a longer piece can be fit on to fewer sheets of paper. This is a great tool for any text, but in particular if you have students who are emerging/struggling readers or students who are English language learners.
uBlock Origin. As long as this is available, I will have it installed. I don't know why it isn't enabled automatically for students in Chromebook environments, but it should be. The readability of the Internet has degraded and will continue to, especially when the Manifest V3 update takes effect in March 2024. uBlock lets me share my screen with the class without worrying about ad content on web pages or on videos. I don't have to wonder if something awkard is going to come up and I know my browsing for school with minors won't be used by scummy ad-tech. When Chrome changes in 2024, I'm going to petition my IT department to let me use Firefox.

Ecological Footprints

2023-12-14T14:53:00-05:00

We're finishing our human population unit in environmental science this week. This has been a difficult unit to teach because many of the solutions offered to combat climate change are much more difficult to envision for high schoolers, especially in a rural setting.

Students each calculatd their own footprint and we had a discussion about how resources in our lives contribute to our footprints. Much of the rhetoric about stopping climate change is around individual choice and ways we use resources. As teens, that isn't always an option.

Living in a rural environment means driving places. Public transportation isn't an option and there may or may not be carpooling options because resources are more spread out. One thing I wish we had done was to map out the difference between one person driving farther to carpool and two people driving less to get somewhere independently. Small differences can add up and it can empower students to take ownership of what they can change.

All that said, I also recognized that there is significant inequity. Corporations and wealthier individuals put out far more carbon than any of us ever will. That doesn't mean we cannot help with solutions, but it also means that we are only able to do so much to contribute to change.

One metric for measuring our own use is to look at our country. These are representations of resource use and are not meant to shame or blame any one person - just a way to reflect on how we contribute to the health of the planet. Hopefully this exercise helped them think through what choices they'll make as they get older.

Leaning Toward Codespaces

2023-12-13T07:07:00-05:00

I'm prepping a revamp of the computer science class we have available at school for next year and my first task has been to figure out a cloud runtime for students. We're on Chromebooks and I would prefer to give kids developer mode access so they can work locally, but that's not an option with my technology director. Replit was one of the education go-to recommendations, but they're shutting down their Teams tool in March to focus on AI tools instead (gag).

GitHub's Codespaces are looking like a good option right now. The fact that I can set up specific dev environments for students ready to go with tooling and extensions available is very appealing. I've switched my preference to modal text editor (I'm writing this in Helix - check it out) but for students, VS Code will be more accessible and easier to dive into.

Codespaces runs a virtual machine right from a repository on GitHub. I can have sample code, tests, and prompts all ready to go for them - students just click the button and get to work in the browser. Because it's a container, they still need to learn how to make changes, stage, commit, and push to the repo, so the workflow skills I'm after can still be developed.

I haven't committed (ha) yet because I still need to look into usage quotas. There is a generous free tier for free use and education has an expanded free tier. I want to make sure that the quota is A) per person and not for the class and B) that the quota is only used when the students are actually working in the environment. I think that's the case, but I need to verify. It would be pretty awkward to turn a large cloud bill into the school because kids are coding too much.

Resurrecting my YouTube Channel

2023-12-12T14:28:00-05:00

I decided to become more active on my YouTube channel again. Students discovered it on their own while doing whatever they do when they look up teachers and they started going through the very old backlog. My style and methods of teaching have changed significatly since some of those original videos were posted, but they don't take me long to make and of the videos I've posted in the last couple of weeks, several students have come up and thanked me for having them available.

I think video as a learning tool is helpful, but not as the primary mode of interaction. I'm sticking with the "Quick Chem" idea right now where I simply talk through an example problem or situation. John Hattie classifies this as a "worked example" - some kind of video that shows the thought process behind doing a thing. In my situation, I want students to engage with the material in class and then go to the video when they need a quick refresher.

I don't want to be a content creator and I don't want my channel to become a main focus. It'll probably just be me, a science teacher, teaching science. And maybe some other stuff.

A Mini Lesson on Reaction Types with Particle Diagrams

2023-12-12T07:26:00-05:00

My students struggled to differentiate single vs double replacement reactions on our latest test. We had used particle diagrams in notes and while practicing, but many students didn't reach for that tool on the test itself. I threw these three slides together to help them see the connection between the particle diagram abstraction (which they can all describe) and the representation of the same idea in a chemical equation.

I prompted students to simply compare and contrast the two reactions represented by colored particles. This got them in the frame of mind to look for patterns and describe those patterns.

Then, we look at two reactions which follow the same pattern to help students connect the chemical representation of change with the particle diagram abstraction.

Since this is a reteach, most students wanted to jump right to identifying the type of reaction rather than identifying patterns. I had to pull them back a little, but once the particle diagram was overlaid, there were a bunch of "light bulb faces" in the room. We're going to reassess later this week to see if this was actually helpful or not.

Chemical Reactions Unit Overview

2023-12-11T11:58:00-05:00

I'm indebted to Nora Walsh, a chemistry teacher in southern Indiana who has comprehensive blog posts over on ChemEd XChange which helped me plan my own unit.

Small is better

This year, I decided to only focus on chemical reactions - their structure, interpretations, and types of reactions. In the past, I had included mol calculations as well. The intent was to help students make a direct link between the reaction ratios and material quantities, but that may have been too much of a stretch. Limiting my scope this year helped me stay laser focused on the key concepts so students could build deeper skill.

Our three learning objectives were:

I can identify indicators of chemical change.
I can balance chemical equations to satisfy the law of conservation of matter.
I can classify types of chemical reactions based on the equation.

Demonstrations of learning

Because these were smaller, more discrete skills, I was able to have them do more targeted practice. My colleague, Melissa, pointed me to a fantastic resource to generate unlimited balancing and reaction ID questions for students to use on their own. Chemquiz.net has dozens of classes of questions you can generate for quick, immediate feedback activities. These shorter feedback cycles helped students catch misconceptions earlier and fix mistakes prior to the test.

I also updated my assignments to have some more written response. The work they submitted was more than skill demonstration - it was skill application. They did much more demonstration on their own, but it wasn't for a score in the book. I'm attempting to shift away from, "what work am I mising?" to "I'm struggling with this skill." It seems like it's taking longer this year to make the change than it has in the past and I'm hoping this particular structure will help.

Labs!

I've tried hard this year to make sure students have hands-on work whenever possible, especially as intro material. I want them to experience chemistry in action as part of the learning process, not as a result of the end of the unit.

I found a shared folder of mini-labs that I've modified into simple experiences for students. Each reaction demonstrates one of the five indicators of chemical change (temperature change, solid formation, gas formation, color change, or odor released) as well as modeling the five types of chemical reactions.

These labs have been sprinkled through the unit as qualitative demos. Students aren't expected to take data or do deep analysis - just observe and experience. These demos are available as reference materials on test days so they can construct responses with actual chemical examples.

Changes for next year

A notable crash and burn for this unit was my attempt to use a card activity to introduce and practice balancing. In principle, it looked great - students would work together to find coefficients for balanced equations. The cards provided a tactile interface and a way to discuss and debate the process.

In reality, the cards added overhead to an idea that totally took the focus away from the skill. They struggled to conceptualize multiple copies of the cards as represented by coefficients. They had a hard time sorting through the large bag of laminated slips to find the right chemical formulas in the first place. All in all, it was a bust.

If I were to redesign that activity, I would do fewer equations and have multiple copies of the same chemical. They could add units of chemical to find a balance and then abstract those duplicates into coefficients. Live and learn for next time suppose.

One lab in particular (the iodine clock) was too early for them. It relies on temperature and concentration differences, but they haven't learned about those yet. I think next time, I'll push that into our solution chem unit so they have a better connection between reaction rates (time) and amount of reactants.

I need to do a little bit more with exothermic and endothermic reaction qualities. These are fun to demo, especially when a reaction gets colder, but students struggled to explain why endothermic reactions, when they absorb heat, feel colder to the observer. Point of reference relationships weren't really a focus and that led to some misconceptions we'll need to address.

Podcasts are in my Past

2023-12-10T17:15:00-05:00

I saw some cool stuff about AntennaPod offering a year-end summary generated from listening stats. Even cooler, it's all done locally on the phone rather than in some cloud account. Good for them.

Anyways, since getting a teaching position at the local high school, my commute time has dropped from 40 minutes each way to about 10 minutes. I could never focus on listening and working at the same time, so my commute was my main time to listen.

Beyond drive time I felt bored with what I would listen to. That's on me for not branching out but - there are bits here and there but most series felt worn out and just rehashes of topics they'd already discussed in earlier shows.

I feel like I'm also preferring written work, kind of like ignoring the tutorial video because I prefer a written guide. Podcasts feel kind of like the video tutorial when I would prefer to do a longer reading session.

Maybe I'll come back some day, but for now I think my podcast listening days are mostly behind me. I don't think podcasting is dead and I actually think it's one of the more accessible forms of creative media, especially for students. I just think it's interesting that my preferences for down time entertainment have changed so dramatically in so short a time.