ohhey[blog]

The Last Word, 23-24

In the past, I had written notes of encouragement to each student. They'd taken different forms from handwritten to printed slips to small conversa... Read more

Fifteen Years

We celebrated our 15th anniversary this weekend. The kids got to stay with their grandparents for two nights so Lindsey and I could have a quiet we... Read more

AI Citations

I made a post on my Mastodon account which struck a chord and kind of went big (for me, anyways). It had to do with new resources coming out on how... Read more

Spring Mists

This is the time of year when the mist settles into the folds of the back pasture. The sun hasn't come up enough to burn it off and the woods and w... Read more

First Swarm of 2024

The spring here is about two weeks ahead of schedule. My bees have been building up and I've already split a couple of hives because they were burs... Read more

The Owl is Back

We have a barred owl who summers in the woods near our house. I'm not sure where he goes in the winter, but he was back this morning. His distinct ... Read more

April 2024 Reading

Another month, another set of books read. I finished more in April than I did in March and I'm going to attribute that to spring break at the start... Read more

Research: Can Teachers Identify AI Writing?

An article came across my timeline this afternoon titled "Do teachers spot AI? Evaluating the detectability of AI-generated texts among student ess... Read more

I Kind of Miss Search

I've started to miss being able to search my blog. I've got nearly 700 posts over 12 years of writing. When it was running on Wordpress, search cam... Read more

Asking AI Something I Already Know

I saw a post, I don't remember where, about how to gauge the usefulness of a model. Instead of asking it something you don't know about (and, as a ... Read more

Playing with llamafile and llama.cpp

Warning: This gets a little rambly, but I'm collecting a lot of my experimenting into one place. Sorry. In my quest to toy with large language mode... Read more

We Saw the Eclipse

I don't really have words to express the feeling of seeing a total solar eclipse yesterday. I knew that I wanted to go after not being able to see ... Read more

March 2024 Reading

Another slow month for reading. But, I think I've determined that trying to read nonfiction during the school year is a mistake. I don't have the m... Read more

On Teachers and AI Use

The Markup had a post this month looking at educators' use of AI tools. I took some time to read it this week, first on my phone and then printed o... Read more

Switching to System Fonts

Tonight, on a whim, I decided to switch my CSS fonts to the system font stack instead of importing a style from Google Fonts. I also bumped the lin... Read more

Firefox After a Month

Earlier this year, I switched to Firefox as my main browser on any machine which supports it. My workstation at school as well as my phone are my p... Read more

Extending Comments on the Blog

Something came over me this week and I decided to extend my little commenting system to allow for threaded replies. Backend I detailed adding comme... Read more

Basement Shows and Lost Music

I'm feeling a bout of nostalgia this week because Spotify decided to play some music I haven't listened to since the early 2000's. I'm a 90's child... Read more

Managing Class Data in Google Sheets

In chemistry, I have students create a solubility curve for an unknown salt to demonstrate how temperature affects solubility of materials. The pro... Read more

LLM Absolutism?

How do you square away the ethics of using an LLM? I'm wrestling with how to responsibly engage with this technology but my unease with everything ... Read more

Impossibly Blue

It is a dreary gray day today. Tomorrow promises to be better - spring is definitely coming. I was scrolling old photos and forgot that I took this... Read more

A More Measured Response to AI in Education

LLMs are here and there isn't anything I can personally do about the fervor. Education is no different than any other industry grabbing to put "AI"... Read more

Hot Garbage AI and Education

This week, Axios published an article about teachers turning to AI to give students feedback and then went on to extol the benefits of a new AI com... Read more

More Thoughts on Standards Tracking

Another test day down and another evening of wrestling with how I track student skill grown and report that through grades. I'm currently giving st... Read more

MSTA 2024

I attended the Michigan Science Teachers Association Conference on March 1st. It was the first all-science teaching conference I'd attended, which ... Read more

This is a Scheduled Post

This is a scheduled post! One thing I miss from a CMS blog is the ability to schedule posts for publication. It turns out a lot of other people run... Read more

February 2024 Reading

I read less in February, but the books were a little longer than January. We also didn't have a week-long break as part of my reading schedule. The... Read more

Installing Helix on a Chromebook

Update November 2024 The post below details how to build Helix from source. This doesn't really provide much of a benefit other than being able to ... Read more

Tinnitus, part 2

Last month, I gave myself a diagnosis of tinnitus. My ears have a strong persistent ring that has started to work its way into my day to day experi... Read more

Fixing Helix Colors on a Chromebook

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 ... Read more

Slow Going

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 ta... Read more

I Hope The Expanse Returns

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 fa... Read more

Delightful New Feeds

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 we... Read more

"Ungrading" an Elective Class

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 ha... Read more

January 2024 Reading

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 f... Read more

Get in touch

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