ohhey[blog]

Spring

We heard the first group long before we could see them. Almost as small as long-distance airliners, the Sandhill crane call is distinct, clear. The... Read more

Planning the AR Study

Some initial thoughts on my action research design as I get ready to write up the study methods and timeline: Since I already have data to look thr... Read more

Considering PD Structures

I'm in the midst of an action research course and my topic is evaluating and reflecting on our systems of PD in the district. This post is the lite... Read more

More Redefinition...

From a post last week where I continued to refine my research question: How does continuity of study (ie, a PD sequence rather than a one-off works... Read more

Connections

This is a copy/paste of a post I wrote in a graduate class. I'm posting it here so I can get back to the ideas after the blackboard course finishes... Read more

Revising the Question...Again

I started a series of professional development workshops with teachers this week. It's a series of half-day work sessions with full departments and... Read more

The Why Loops

I spent some time last week running through some "why" loops to hone in on reasons behind my potential research question. I think the question is b... Read more

School Shootings and the Cheerily Gruesome World of DIY Classroom Prep

This is an eye-opening look at the teacher-as-content-creator world of classroom DIY. Two quotes jump out that highlight the broken legislative sys... Read more

Checking Implementation

Running PD for an entire district is a challenge. The biggest gap I see is knowing how or when teachers actually use what they've learned in a sess... Read more

Reassessing in Standards Based Grading

I'm helping several teachers move toward standards-based grading practices this year. We work a lot on philosophy - why they'd want to use this gra... Read more

Potential Action Research

I'm taking a graduate course this semester on action research, part of which is defining and designing a question to tackle. Most of the coursework... Read more

Copy Notes Between Google Sheets

If you work in big systems, sometimes you come across a situation where you want to share a single tab of a Google Sheet with someone else rather t... Read more

Running arbtt on Mac OS

Tom Woodward has a semi-regular weekly roundup blog post with links to interesting things he finds on the Internet. A couple weeks back, he posted ... Read more

A Case for Pi

I've never had a case for my Raspberry Pi because...well...I just haven't. One of our schools recently purchased all kinds of STEM stuff and I've b... Read more

DNA Structure Card Sort

This week, I co-taught an AP Biology class with one of our high school teachers. She was looking for a way to have students wrestle with the molecu... Read more

I Took a Deep Breath and Contributed to an Open Source Project

I've been playing around with building websites and self-teaching myself (is that redundant?) web development languages. I feel like I've crossed s... Read more

Server Hardening and SSL

Last night, I got [a self-hosted photo sharing site](https://photos.ohheybrian.com) up and running on my raspberry pi 3. You can see more about tha... Read more

Forget the Mac Mini, Bring on the Raspberry

This weekend I decided to try and tackle [turning a Mac Mini into a server to host my own photos](https://blog.ohheybrian.com/2018/11/reviving-the-... Read more

Reviving the Mac Mini

My wife bought a Mac Mini toward the end of college that has been sitting in our basement pretty much since we went to Korea in 2009. I've been wan... Read more

Element Interactivity in the Classroom - The Effortful Educator

an element is anything that needs to be learned or processed and the interactivity relates to how reliant one element is on other elements for comp... Read more

Deconstructing Hattie's Effect Sizes

When taking the necessary in-depth look at Visible Learning with the eye of an expert, we find not a mighty castle but a fragile house of cards tha... Read more

Google's Narrow Focus on Digital Literacy

“We are helping them become more knowledgeable about what the digital landscape is like,” Mr. Hodgson said of his students, “so they can make choic... Read more

Twitter's Card Update is Bad For Users

Twitter made a UI change this week with it's card-styled link previews. It's subtle, but the changes have hurt accessibility and hurt the end user.... Read more

Listening Has Changed My Coaching

Aside from trying to be as productive as I can every day, listening - truly listening to people - has completely changed my coaching. Elena Agular ... Read more

The role of the faculty in the post-LMS world (opinion)

However, working outside the LMS, well-trained instructors will be able to do far more than meet the minimal requirements for moving college course... Read more

If We Don’t Allow A Redo, What Are We Teaching? – The Teacher And The Admins

Whatever the reason, he was afforded the opportunity to learn and apply. It hasn’t come easy, but that’s the point. Giving a chance to redo isn’t a... Read more

Fair Isn't Always Equal: Three Grading Practices to Avoid

Remember, though, that grades should not be used as rewards. Nor should they be used as affirmation, compensation, or validation. Grades should rep... Read more

Lesson Idea: Learning Objectives

Jessica Till asks a good question on Twitter: [embed]https://twitter.com/JessicaTilli1/status/1044423084529389568[/embed] and Graham's response sto... Read more

The Psychology of Classroom Discussions

I've never heard of the Asch Experiment, but this video is worth watching. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA-gbpt7Ts8[/embed] [Kaplinsky's ... Read more

Back to School

It's appropriate to write a back to school post nearly a month into the school year. I took Twitter off my phone back in July in an effort to put m... Read more

Reading Summaries

I've decided to fire up a new, static website to reflect on books I read this year. In all honesty, much of this is bring prompted by my grad schoo... Read more

Yes, Relationships Matter

I'm in some grad classes right now and in one, we were assigned to discuss, "Does building relationships with students _really_ matter?" Prior to t... Read more

The Big Dig

Our septic system needed to be upgraded, so we took the hottest weekend of the year (so far) to do it. My wife's dad and brother spent the day with... Read more

Killing Pico (and Micro)

Earlier this year, I wrote up a really bare-bones blogging system I called [Pico](https://blog.ohheybrian.com/2018/04/pico-a-tiny-blog/). It's a Py... Read more

Moving back to WordPress

You might not have noticed (or you might have...who knows) but this site is now back on WordPress. I had shifted to Jekyll back in December for the... Read more

Get in touch

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