ohhey[blog]

Outsourcing, EdTech, and 1986

Outsourcing education doesn’t look like robots taking over our classes. It happens when we willingly turn over the tasks of teaching to machines wi... Read more

Digital Teaching and Learning is Great (Until It’s Not)

The nuances of digital teaching and learning are often lost on Twitter and off-the-cuff blogs. Posts long enough to explore some of the finer point... Read more

Adding a Bullet Journal to my Work

I took most of the summer off from writing, but now that school is getting back into swing, it’s time to start thinking out loud again. Back in May... Read more

Ultra-Specific Classification

The edu-blogification of ideas gets overwhelming. Six years ago, I went to a workshop on using videos to help with my instruction. We called it the... Read more

Getting Busy with todo.txt

Keeping a todo list has always been a struggle for me. I have a notebook, I have some stuff in Google Keep, I’ve tried Google Tasks, Any.do, Rememb... Read more

2017 End of Year Notes

In what’s become a half-tradition, some unfiltered thoughts as I finish another school year. – Splitting time between teaching and instructional co... Read more

Using Someone Else’s Videos in Your Class

In November 2015, an independent model showed YouTube received around 500 hours of video content uploaded every minute. There are 1440 minutes in a... Read more

Update to Endnote Generator

If you’ve used Endnote Generator in your Docs, thanks. I posted an update this evening which will retain the formatting of your footnotes. So, if y... Read more

You Are the Product

The New York Times profiled Google’s rush into education over the last eight years in a long piece this weekend. Some initial thoughts: – The value... Read more

Tech Training Outside of Content

Our district is distributing 13,000 iPads in the next 24 months. We have ~1,300 staff who need to be trained on instructional methods with technolo... Read more

Desmos in Science

I’ve wanted to try the Desmos activity builder for a long time, so I finally did. We were finishing up the nervous system, so I grabbed a graph of ... Read more

Badges? We Might Want to Think About Stinking Badges…

Some initial, mostly unfiltered thoughts on digital badges from a professional development perspective: Most badging programs are too simple. They ... Read more

Privacy Concerns are Just Beginning

Bill Fitzgerald already wrote an analysis of what can happen now that Congress has essentially erased privacy rules governing how Internet Service ... Read more

No, Today’s Students Don’t Learn Differently

If you’re working in instructional support (#edtech, instructional tech, learning support…whatever you want to call it) you’ve probably heard, “Tod... Read more

Teach Like a Teacher

Teaching is being overrun by impostors. Perhaps I’m reading into something, but the explosion of “Teach Like a [thing]” culture scares me. Cultural... Read more

Review Questions with Spreadsheets

I wanted to use a new method of reviewing with students as we wrap up our cell activity unit. I’ve been working with my students on forming questio... Read more

There is No Room for Pride on a Team

I’m proud of the work I do every day, both in my classroom and in the small instructional team I work with. There’s nothing wrong with being proud ... Read more

Kinsman Soap

This is a cross post from my photo-a-day(ish) blog, the photoyear. — Kinsman soap flickr photo by bennettscience shared under a Creative Commons (B... Read more

Building a Custom Registration Form with Google Apps

One of the main responsibilities my team has is offering and running training on a number of resources teachers in the district have access to. The... Read more

If You Haven’t Changed Practice, Don’t Call It Flipped

When I try new things, the fear really sets in as I’m giving instructions and trying to pick up on the nonverbal cues my students are sending me. M... Read more

Fixing Invalid frob Error in darktable on OSX

I use darktable to edit my photos. It’s a really robust RAW photo editor with a very active development community. The GitHub repo has 19,000+ comm... Read more

2017 Project: Photo Year

Pictures launch stories. I take a lot of photos and like most people, they stay on my phone. I used to use Instagram, but I’m not happy with their ... Read more

Introducing: Endnote Generator Add On

A year ago, I posted a script which converts footnotes in a Google Doc into endnotes. I’ve gotten great comments and feedback and have made the sta... Read more

Developing on a Chromebook

I do some (really) amateur web development when I get a chance to. I enjoy building things that make life easier for me, and others, using the Inte... Read more

Random sort a Google Sheet easily

I was working on student grades in a Google Sheet last night and I needed an easy way to randomly sort students so I could show some score adjustme... Read more

Networking, IndieWeb, and Finding a Place to Put Stuff

I feel like I’m on a social networking pilgrimage. I left Facebook two years ago and haven’t looked back. (Well, technically, like Alan Levine, I’m... Read more

Link Two Google Docs for Translating

An interesting Stack Overflow question popped up about auto-translating one document into another when edits are made. Most Google services have th... Read more

Tracking Missing IDs with a Google Sheet

Like many schools, our students are asked to wear their student ID’s when they come into the building each day. During the day, they don’t need to ... Read more

Drawing Notes

I used to make fill-in-the-blank notes for my students to complete while watching a video. For a particular subset of students, that works well. He... Read more

Losing Stories

Startup culture ate one of my stories this year and I just found out about it this week. I check for broken links on my blog. It’s mainly because I... Read more

Building a Custom Web App from Google Sheets

I’m working with a group of teachers to run a mock election this week. They had a basic Form set up for students to vote along with two other “pie-... Read more

Looking for Help with Canvas LMS

We’re using Canvas this year in our district and I’m trying to figure out how to actively (and successfully) utilize the Learning Mastery gradebook... Read more

Displaying Aggregate Data in Google Sheets

Our students are required to have their student ID on when they come into the building each day. This is mainly for security, but their ID also all... Read more

Old Post Revisit – The New Education Economy of “Free”

This is a new post format I’m going to try out from time to time. I don’t remember where I saw the original idea, but that person suggested going b... Read more

Turning an Old Laptop into a Video Kiosk

My father-in-law came to me with an interesting idea. He wanted to create video kiosk for our church which would play videos on different mission o... Read more

Get in touch

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