ohhey[blog]

Dealing with Bad Questions

...not all questions are created equal and some questions inhibit learning. Source: Yes, There is Such a Thing as a Bad Question — Teachers Going G... Read more

Break's End

The end of summer break is always a little weird. I have a shorter vacation than normal because of the nature of my job, but going back to work at ... Read more

Coming Back Around

This week, my wife pointed something out to me: our entire dinner was either something we grew or something we helped raise. Vegetables from our ga... Read more

Cloud Power

Summer brings some pop up storms at the end of the day when the humid air starts to cool. They often form over Lake Michigan to the west and slowly... Read more

Recent Happenings

We're in the throes of summer and there have been a number of events, ranging from new construction (because there is never enough stuff to build),... Read more

Adventures in Building an Interactive Apps Script Sidebar

Now that I've finished a rewrite of an application in HTMX, I wanted to see if HTMX could be used to enhance the use of Google Apps Script sidebar ... Read more

Moving from Svelte to HTMX

Last year, I built an event registration tool for our district, mainly to keep track of what professional development we were doing and try to get ... Read more

Sort a Google Sheet with Vertically Merged Ranges

This is a quick tip, but if you've ever tried to sort a sheet with vertically-merged rows, you've probably been disappointed. Here's an example: If... Read more

That Time I Deleted a Database

I've been hobby programming for several years that has spilled over into making applications for staff at school. One of those tools is a website t... Read more

Systems of Trust and web3 in Education

This post has been percolating in my mind for several months. It started as an opus that sat stale in my drafts because I didn't want to wrestle th... Read more

Check for alt tags with a Bookmarklet

tl;dr If you want a quick way to check if images on a webpage contain alt text (for screen readers), I made a bookmarklet that will blur images wit... Read more

Because Everything is a Priority...

My job for the last six years years has been to identify and provide professional development for staff. We set goals, looked at upcoming challenge... Read more

Using Google Apps Script as a Webhook

Google Apps Script projects can be published as web apps when you’re done with them. This is helpful if you’re building a tool with a simple UI (us... Read more

New PD Site: SuperAdmins

Starting off with this project, I knew it would need a strong admin interface. One of the problems I mentioned initially is that all of the PD trou... Read more

New PD Site: Presenters

sWe’ve had a look at how users work in the new PD site, so let’s take a look at another major player: presenters. The word “presenter” is really lo... Read more

New PD Site: Staff User

This spring and summer, I've taken on a full-blown re-write of our PD registration and management system. Our current system is a collection of cen... Read more

Bees, bees, bees

Several years ago, my wife took a short beekeeping course with her mom. They tried a hive in their backyard a few times, but the colonies never sur... Read more

Handling Paginated API Responses in Google Apps Script

One of my favorite things about Google Apps Script is that I can get information from an API and write it directly to a shared document or spreadsh... Read more

Movement when Motion Is Hard

We're in a situation where staff are overwhelmed. Teachers are feeling under water all the time, trying to make materials to support online learnin... Read more

Sending System Audio to Google Meet

In 2013, I wrote up how to record Google Hangouts in high quality for podcasting or whatever. This post is how to essentially do the same, but for ... Read more

Sending Charts from Google Forms

We're getting ready to launch a digital teaching and learning course for staff that is based on the TPACK framework. A few years ago, we started ou... Read more

Google Sheets, SpreadAPI, and an Extension

This is a revisit to a post I wrote four years ago in which we used a spreadsheet and Google's nifty little hidden JSON data endpoint to serve data... Read more

Three Problems with Online Teaching

We started our school year today. We have a split group of teachers who are fully online and a group who is hybrid, two days in school and three da... Read more

Revisiting My Personal Productivity

This fall, I started to revisit my personal productivity habits. We lost a team member last spring and we won't be replacing that role, which means... Read more

Supporting Hybrid and Online Learning

My district is entering a phase where students are in one of two situations: fully online or a hybrid with two days in person and three days online... Read more

Construction, continued...

It was a busy July, working full time on the house. At the end of the month, we were nearly dried in and have started to shift our focus toward pre... Read more

This Site is Under Construction

Last month, my family broke ground on a new house. Less than a year ago, we were just toying with the idea of building a house, and now we're actua... Read more

Add a Google Meet to Calendar Events with Google Apps Script

My small team relies on automation to make things run. Part of our PD process is a Google Form workflow that kicks off calendar events, document cr... Read more

Get a List of All Students and Missing Work from Canvas

In a Canvas course, you can quickly check the number of missing assignments for single students relatively quickly. You can also message groups of ... Read more

Copy Canvas Enrollments to Another Course

While schools are closed, we've moved much of our long term staff development material into Canvas. We have one long-running course with all staff ... Read more

DocuTube Shutdown, June 2020

tl;dr: The DocuTube addon will be removed from the Marketplace at the end of June, 2020. If you're a programmer and you want to take over ownership... Read more

Updating Canvas Notification Preferences

This is a technical post. Read on for code and commentary. In moving to online, we've tried to streamline all of our communication through Canvas. ... Read more

A Photo API in Python

I started a small project to clean up my personal photo hosting. I'm currently using an app written in PHP, but it's way over my head and does way ... Read more

Quince House

I just finished packing up our first house, to be put on the market tomrorow morning after living here for eight years. As I moved from room to roo... Read more

Performance Tasks in SBG

I was given a good challenge by our secondary curriculum coordinator a couple weeks back. He wanted to know how we get in front of standards-based ... Read more

Get in touch

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