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 (BY) license

My family has a heart for the refugee crisis. We’ve researched how we can help Syrians, in particular, fleeing civil war find their way to the United States. Unfortunately, Indiana has some of the most restrictive regulations in place in terms of bringing in or facilitating the arrival of refugees.

Kinsman soap is run by the Preemptive Love Coalition as a way to support refugees who cannot make it somewhere safer. We received gifts of soap made by men and women who haven’t been home in years. This is our small way of helping from a distance.

If you’d like to know more about the organization, check out their website at www.preemptivelove.org/kinsman.

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 most popular, because of their new-ness, are Google Apps (GSuite…whatever) and Canvas. Because we offer so many workshops, our Drive is full of copies of copies of copies of registration forms. So, I built a custom registration form using Google Apps Script and a Sheet. This detail-heavy post walks through the entire process with code.

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. Most days, they roll with it. Other days…well, there is usually some kind of course correction in there.

But it’s part of my practice now. Not crashing and burning of course; I learn a lot on those days, but I try not to make them the norm. My practice is to constantly as, “Can this be better?” Sometimes, the answer is “No, not right now,” and that’s totally okay. Other times, I’m actively trying to improve on a lesson, a task, or a supporting item.

Flipping is easy to jump into. Need to teach something? Find a video. Slap an EdPuzzle quiz on there and post it through Google Classroom. Students, turn in a one page summary of what you watched. Quiz on Friday.

Don’t keep your practice the same and call it flipped.

flickr photo shared by Daniel Kulinski under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license

How are students engaging with the ideas? Not engaging with the video, but with the idea? The intangible? The abstract? The metaphorical? How are your students processing what you need them to learn in meaningful ways?

Flipping is really about a core change in practice that forces you, the teacher, to recognize that effective, deep learning requires our students chew on ideas…and not just gnaw, but really chew hard. Video might be a component of the chewing, but it can’t be the beginning and the end.

How do we avoid falling into a trap of simply adding another task to check off the list in the learning cycle? I have three main self-checks:

1. Keep the video _thin_. This is the first exposure, not the only (or even main) exposure. Some questions should be answered, but I really want to get students asking more questions. I try to ride the line of thorough instruction and full instruction.
2. Explicitly connect ideas from the video to class. I do this in a number of ways from a quick five-minute warm up at the start of class (“Remember, in the video…”) or in the video itself as a preview (“We’re going to do a lab where…”). I’ve found that these peeks help students make connections more readily as the learning tasks come around.
3. Tell them the videos aren’t enough to get by on. I don’t remember when this hit me, but I never really said that the video alone isn’t enough to help them learn. I make sure it’s very, very clear that they need to engage with me – and each other – during class to really excel. Video is a tool, not the solution.

In the long run, by downplaying the magic-ness of your videos and underlining the importance of multiple modes of engagement, your practice will begin to change. You’ll use that reclaimed time more effectively and you’ll find yourself starting to look critically at everything you do.

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+ commits on it over the last five or six years, which is great because it means active improvements. Open source FTW.

It’s built mainly for Linux, but somewhere, someone added an OSX installer. I edit my photos and then used the Flickr export option to dump them right up to my albums. Over a year ago, I got a really weird error about an invalid “frob” that prevented authenticating.

After digging…a lot…the problem started in 2014 when Flickr required HTTPS calls to the API. Tonight, I figured out how to patch the broken library in the app so I can upload to Flickr again from darktable. Hurray.

To fix, you’ll need to grab the latest version of the flickcurl library. The one packaged with the app is out of date, using HTTP requests rather than HTTPS requests. I used Homebrew to grab a copy (brew install flickcurl) but you can also download a zip file and install that way.

All apps on Mac have files you can explore. I worked in the command line because it was faster for me than opening a couple Finder windows, but you could do it that way, too.

Terminal command

cp Your/File/Location/libflickcurl.0.dylib /Applications/darktable.app/Contents/Resources/lib

Finder window

1. Open a finder window with your downloaded library. Then, open a second Finder window and go to Applications. Right click on libflickcurl.0.dylib and click Copy.
2. Right click on Darktable and choose “Show package contents”

1. Go to Contents > Resources > lib
2. Right click in the folder and select Paste (or Cmd + V) and then click Replace.

The next time darktable opens, you’ll use the updated flickcurl library and be able to share directly from the app itself.

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 terms or use limitations on photos (ever tried to embed an image? It’s a nightmare). Maybe I’m an idealist and this is a funk, but whatever.

I’m posting to Flickr more and more regularly and I decided to make a small project for 2017. I’m going to tag a photo each day that will push it and the description over to a new blog I’m calling The Photoyear. It’ll syndicate that photo (technical stuff below) and turn it into a blog post. You can subscribe via RSS over there if you’d like. Sometimes, I’ll cross post it here, but that will be a place for pictures and their stories for the next year.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

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 standalone script better, which is still available.

The Endnote Generator Add-On is now available in the Chrome Web Store for Docs. Install it once and you’ll be able to create endnotes from the footnotes you’ve already inserted in your doc.

There are a couple of known issues (pictures with a footnote aren’t included yet), but if you run into anything, leave a note here or on GitHub.

Check out the Endnote Generator.

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 Internet to drive the functionality. I’ve also been working more and more on a Chromebook just because it’s easier to carry around than my 15″ Mac.

The big problem with the Chromebook is that it’s pretty locked down. I got permission from our IT department to put mine into developer mode (which is usually restricted when enrolled in a GSuite environment) so I could make things work.

First, this is not the same as working on a full-fledged computer. The RAM available on this machine is minimal, which really limits what I can do. It also partitions the hard drive in really strange ways, which makes it hard to keep a neat filesystem.

I started by installing Crouton, which puts a Ubuntu desktop environment on the Chromebook. It’s run in parallel, which makes it nice for jumping back and forth. You can also choose which flavor of Ubuntu you like, from xfce to Unity.

I used Crouton to run Gimp and git, mostly. But, I wasn’t using Gimp as much as I expected and it really slowed down the device. I ended up dropping it in favor of Chromebrew, which has worked beautifully. It’s a package manager built specifically for Chrome which includes things like Git, Ruby, python, imagemagick…all kinds of things that make life easier working on such a stripped down device.

I use a mix of Chrome apps to work in.

1. Crosh – Similar to the bash environment, crosh is the Chrome’s terminal emulator. You can get to it by hitting Ctrl + Alt + T. If you’re not in developer mode, most of what you can do is look at system stats. All other functions are locked down. Once you’re in developer mode, you can type in shell and browse the filesystem (Linux-based) just like any other full computer. This is where I run git.
2. Caret – Caret is a Chrome text editor that supports syntax highlighting and offline use. It’s based on Sublime Text, so it includes custom keymaps and functions to help the process. https://github.com/thomaswilburn/Caret/wiki.
3. **Secure Shell – Another Chrome app which emulates a SSH client. Really handy for jumping in and out of my own remote server as I need things. Much faster than relying on the cPanel through my hosts’s admin panel.

It’s lightweight, but it works well. Chrome’s own developer tools and console are really helpful with autocomplete and error logging (just like any other browser, really).

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 adjustments. Sheets lets you sort A-Z and Z-A easily, but there’s no baked in random function, which makes sense.

I could have scripted it, but it was late and I was feeling lazy. There’s an easier method.

Grab a column and enter =rand(). This will generate a random number between 0 and 1. Click and drag this down the entire range. Then, sort this column A-Z. Hey presto! Random sorting a Sheet.

Notice that the random column changes every time something else is clicked. This won’t affect anything other than the sorting, but it allows you to resort if it isn’t “random enough.”

I’ve been ruminating on a way to use Sheets and Google Apps Script as a fully-functional gradebook. I’m not there yet, but I can see this being helpful in that implementation.

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 there, but only to manage a page for a group.)

Twitter is becoming super-broadcasty. It’s still a fun space in some respects because it’s the only space I can connect with some dear friends. Goofiness matters. I check it, but I’m only paying attention to very specific items. I also push out things I’m doing. But, there are fewer and fewer replies these days.

Mastodon is a newer, federated Twitter-meets-Tumblr social space that I’ve poked around in. There are definitely some merits, but some things I’m not super happy with. We’ll see, ultimately, what ends up happening there.

Just today, I checked back into Known, both through Reclaim Social and through my own little stream. I’d tried Known a while ago but ultimately abandoned it because I don’t think I really understood how it worked.

When all is said and done, I think I’m looking for something of substance that can go anywhere. It’s really difficult to find that balance, and I’m not sure I ever will. The need for connections is real and it’s what drove me to pour into Twitter and blogging four or five years back. The desire to connect is still there, but the means of connecting are more and more limited even though we have a number of choices. I want flexibility. I want ownership.

I’ve grown up a bunch, and I’m giving Known a shot again because I think I finally understand the power behind the POSSE model. Hopefully, this’ll scratch the itch.

An interesting Stack Overflow question popped up about auto-translating one document into another when edits are made. Most Google services have things called “triggers” which run functions after some kind of event – opening the doc, making a change, etc.

A Google Doc does not have access to the onEdit trigger, so there is no way to automatically run the translation unless you put it on a timer trigger, and that’s a waste of resources, especially if you’re not constantly updating the document. But, you can link two documents together via the ID and push changes made using a custom menu.

Grab a copy of the template with instructions.

Source:

var ui = DocumentApp.getUi();
var docProps = PropertiesService.getDocumentProperties();

function getText() {
  var doc = DocumentApp.getActiveDocument();
  var body = doc.getBody();
  var array = [];

  array.push(body.getText());

  sendTheText(array);
}

function sendTheText(e) {
  if (docProps.getProperty("childId") == "") {
    var prompt = ui.prompt("Child doc ID", ui.ButtonSet.OK);
    var response = prompt.getResponseText()
    docProps.setProperty("childId", response);
  }
  var childDoc = DocumentApp.openById(docProps.getProperty("childId"));
  var es = LanguageApp.translate(e, 'en', 'es');
  childDoc.getBody().clear();
  childDoc.getBody().appendParagraph(es);
}

function clearProps() {
  docProps.setProperty("childId", "");
}

function onOpen() {
  ui.createMenu("Custom Translate").addItem("Run", "getText").addItem("Clear IDs","clearProps").addToUi();
}

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 have them on…just in the morning so we can make sure people coming in are part of our student body. If a student doesn’t have their ID, we issue a temporary and track how many times they don’t have one when they come to school. This process used to be done by hand each morning. A queue would form and a teacher would write down ID numbers (they all have them memorized) and names. This caused several problems:

1. If a student gave a fake ID number, office staff wouldn’t know until much later in the day.
2. The paper copy of the ID list was given to a secretary to transcribe into a spreadsheet.
3. Transcribing meant looking up the ID in our SIS and then manually entering the number of times the student didn’t have their ID.
4. When benchmarks were hit (5, 8, 11), disciplinary action was issued and followed up on by an assistant principal.

I spoke with the head secretary and we worked out a custom Google Sheet to do all of this automatically. Now, the duty station is equipped with a Chromebook so the teacher issuing IDs can quickly check veracity of the given ID and have all of the tally work done. This (mega) post outlines the sheet structure and custom code used to do the work.

The template and source are linked at the bottom of the post.

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. Helping lower the barrier for learning by providing a construct for information gathering led to more engagement when it came time to use the information.

Then I took on AP Biology.

Some very wise people told me to teach the material and not provide so much structure. I wouldn’t be able to put in the amount of time it would take to get everything pre-made. And boy, were they right. (I’ve taught AP Chem, but that was a long time ago. I needed their reminders.)

I’ve also wanted to move to a more free-form video…not as structured. More fluid. Focused more on deep content. Trying to write while I spoke at the same time was difficult to maintain. So, in response, I’ve moved to drawing out the lesson notes, scanning it, and talking over the pictures.

flickr photo shared by bennettscience under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license

flickr photo shared by bennettscience under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license

This has helped my students improve their own visual representations of the concepts. It’s also helped me tell a better story (all science is a story anyways. Now it’s an illustrated story).

I sketch the notes…maybe 20 minutes to get everything sorted, and then scan it in to the computer. I drop the image into Camtasia and go for it.

Low key, but early indications are that it’s just as effective as fill in the blank. But now, students can fill in their own blanks.

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 don’t like getting emails that such-and-such link doesn’t work anymore from a reader. I try to repair what I can and I remove what’s dead (sites and apps die a little too frequently).

One of my favorite posts from a couple of years back had a broken link, so I went to check it. Turns out, Storehouse, a great storytelling app I used for a while, closed shop in July. Along with it went my photos, videos, and stories published. No notice, no warning. Just gone.

The story embedded on the page? Gone. Replaced with the sad face.

The video of my daughter learning to crawl? Gone.

Shame on me for not backing up better. Shame on us for pouring our stories, images, and videos into a culture that packs up and moves on with no warning.

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-in-the-sky” ideas:

1. Assign electoral votes by homeroom to simulate the Electoral College.
2. Have a live-update view of the election teachers could show in their classrooms.

## Electoral Votes

To set up the electoral system, we created a database sheet in the workbook. We listed each teacher in the school and then assigned an electoral value. The next eight columns are used to tally votes per candidate per homeroom. I was able to do this using the `COUNTIFS` function to match the candidate **and** the homeroom teacher.

Another sheet was added to do the electoral tallies. This formula is a little more complex. I needed to grab the data from each row, find the max, and then check which candidate matches the max column. My final formula was:

`=if(and(voteTotals!$D2=0,voteTotals!$E2=0,voteTotals!$F2=0),0,if(max(voteTotals!$D2:$F2)=voteTotals!D2,voteTotals!$C2,0))`

Broken down:

1. If all candidates are 0, leave as 0 (it was assigning electoral votes to all three before this)
2. If 1 is false, check if the `MAX` value for that row is the same as the candidate header.
3. If 2 is true, assign the electoral votes. If false, leave as zero.

It works well and calculates instantly, which is really nice. The columns are then summed by candidate.

## Popular vote

The electoral vote took care of the presidential candidates, but I still needed popular vote totals for all of the candidates. That was a simple `SUM` function pulled from Sheet 2 which aggregated votes by homeroom. I didn’t need to worry about cross-checking against candidates because I was just interested in the totals.

Now that the tallying is done, I turned my attention to the live updates. My first testing was with a published chart from the spreadsheet. You can publish them without exposing the underlying data, which makes sharing results much simpler. But, it turns out, that leaving the chart options as “automatically publish updates” means anywhere from 10-30 minutes later. Not great for a live-update.

After some digging, I settled on the fact that a custom chart built with the Google Visualization API would be the best way to immediately show poll data.

## Coding the Chart

This took much longer than I expected because the Google Visualization API expects you to send a `QUERY` call to get data from a live spreadsheet to draw the chart. I’ve not used the Query language much, and in the end, my data wasn’t structured well enough in the spreadsheet to easily get what I wanted.

Using Google Apps Script, I was able to grab the spreadsheet data and create my own array to then give to the API for the chart.

## Displaying Popular Votes

The teachers also wanted to display the popular vote for all of the elections (President, Governor, Senate, House) next to the electoral data. This wasn’t too bad and I was able to set up a simple HTML table (using CSS `display: table`) to load the live data using AJAX.

Instead of having teachers reload the page every few minutes, the last two lines on the client-side code will re-run each script with fresh data, updating the site on it’s own.

## Why use a web app?

This is definitely more complicated than it could have been. But, I went with a web app approach for two main reasons:

1. Simplicity for the _user_
2. Data security

They’re collecting some demographic information that they don’t want published, which is one of the problems with just sharing the sheet out with the entire school staff. They also wanted to make sure the vote wasn’t damaged by someone accidentally changing some of the cell calculations.

The nice thing about running a web app is that I can still require a school district login to see the page. Additionally, even if the page were public, it hides the original spreadsheet key because you don’t need it in the client-side scripts. So that spreadsheet data is relatively safe from prying eyes.

Watch for a follow up post with the election results and a wrap up on how using the app went.

• • *The featured image is a [flickr photo](https://flickr.com/photos/nikkacorsino/4334364416 “Mock elections 2010”) shared by [Two2Travel](https://flickr.com/people/nikkacorsino) under a [Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/)

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 alongside the traditional gradebook…sort of a hybrid SBG.

I have Outcomes set for the entire year (the AP Bio curriculum) and I’m assigning Outcomes to each assignment. This is transferring nicely into the Learning Mastery gradebook. At the same time, coursework (labs, tests, etc) are being entered as normal assignments in the traditional gradebook. What I’m trying to figure out is how to weigh the Learning Mastery gradebook into the traditional.

Right now, as far as I can tell, you cannot have the Mastery gradebook results pushed directly into the traditional gradebook. So, I would have to copy each individual Outcome I’m assessing as an individual assignment in the course. I can do it, but it’s far from ideal.

I’m sure there are some of you out there who also use Canvas and hopefully, the Learning Mastery portion of the gradebook. What advice do you have? Any tips?

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 allows cafeteria, library, and other office staff to scan their ID for various clerical tasks.

When a student *doesn’t* have their ID, they’re issued a temporary wristband so faculty and staff know they’ve checked in for the day and that their record has been updated. The update process involved a paper copy made at a cart with wristbands being passed to a secretary who would then look up the student and add it to a spreadsheet before adding it to our SIS. Dang.

The head secretary (Deb) and I worked out a Google Sheet that does all of that (minus the SIS portion, but that’s coming soon).

I’ll outline the functions below, but you can [grab a copy of a blank sheet to play with](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MHrQVM0tPql8gx2tKfFlJwc5teNyDx8-LJ1FRulKFv0/copy) if you’d like to tinker or improve.

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 back, reading old posts, and then commenting on changed perspectives as a method of reflection.

I use [Alan Levine’s](http://www.twitter.com/cogdog) [PHP script to dig up wold WordPress posts](http://stackoverflow.com/a/27569816/2278429) by simply visiting [blog.ohheybrian.com/random](http://blog.ohheybrian.com/random) and re-reading. Try it yourself for some vintage bennettscience.

_If you’d like perspective, [here is the original post](http://blog.ohheybrian.com/2014/10/the-new-education-economy-of-free)._

Paying for software continues to be a four-letter word in EDUland. Some of the reasons free services are important are legitimate (I only have so much of my own money to spend) and some aren’t (I’m a teacher, help me out). In particular,

We need to differentiate between the free sharing of ideas and the free sharing of products.

Also, there seems to have been a rise in EDU-ratti who suggest that you give away lessons and your custom materials away for free as long as you remember to buy their book on 50 ways to do that. There cannot be a double standard.

Alan (he’s shown up a lot in my posts lately) [says it much better than I do](http://cogdogblog.com/2016/10/flickr-cc0/):

I get hired to provide them as a service, despite the fact people can use my stuff for free. You make a living from providing services, consulting, ideas, not from digital stuff. If I was a pro photographer, I would hope to make money from the service, not the products. I would get more clients if they can find examples of my work in the world.

Looking back at the original article, I think that was the point I was trying to make. It’s not selling the product (the book, curriculum…whatever) that’s worth the cost, it’s the **service you provide in creating that product.**

The distinction is very small, but again, it gets to the idea that we have to value the time and effort – the service – that goes into creating any product, be it a book or software.

Consider the tools you’re using now. If it’s free, there is usually an option to send some love to the developers through a donation. If not, send them a note and ask how you can buy that person a beer.

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 organizations we’re involved with. The wall – previously – had photos and text about each missionary or organization, but he wanted to revamp.

We initially tried to use PowerPoint and a custom keyboard to jump to different slides, but maintaining and updating that system wasn’t going to be very elegant or user friendly. So, about a year later, I had an “oh, duh” moment and realized we could do it as a static, locally-hosted website. It would be easy to build and even easier to maintain, so that’s what we did.

In this post, I’ll talk about the hardware and software we used to get it finished. There are still some things to hammer out, but the bones of the project are done and tested successfully, so it seems like a good time to document it.

sudo echo `date '+%s' -d '+ 10 minutes'` > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm

Consider the train problem:

A train is barreling down the tracks. At a fork, you have the option of flipping the train to the left branch or the right branch. On the left side is someone you know, tied to the rails. On the right, there are five strangers.

Which way do you throw the switch?

A philosophy professor posed the question to his two-year old.

The great thing about this is that he was still solving a problem…it just wasn’t the expected problem.

I think a lot of frustration can come up in a classroom comes from ambiguity. I may have a problem and anticipated solution, but if that isn’t clear to students, conflict can pop up when they take a different path. Even more, defining specific solutions to problems worth discussion is a poor teaching method.

Next time you’re given an unexpected solution, consider the validity of a different point of view.

I was talking with our school librarian today about why we don’t offer ebooks for students to check out. It came up because I grabbed a real, hardcover library book six weeks ago and had _just_ finished it this week. It’s only 400ish pages, and taking that long to read a short/medium length book was a little embarrassing.

Compared to reading on my phone or my Kindle, it was an eternity. I like the portability of ebooks. I like being able to pull it up on my phone and read a little when I’m sitting, waiting for something. Especially this year, as I move all over the district day to day, carrying another book in my bag is precious space that’s often wasted due to time.

Ebooks sound great, but I got thinking about [Maha Bali’s post on “owning” a domain](http://blog.mahabali.me/blog/educational-technology-2/i-dont-own-my-domain-i-rent-it-dooo/) and [Audrey Watters’ fantastic take](http://hackeducation.com/2016/08/23/domains) (rebuttal?) on the topic. [I even weighed in a little bit](http://blog.ohheybrian.com/2016/08/flipped-learning-as-a-way-to-build-an-online-presence/) on how teachers can start to build that identity.

I don’t want to encourage a culture where ownership is a burden. Moving school libraries to epubs sounds great: access! they’re on their phones anyways! Kindle!…

…but in practice, it’s a school, paying a company to _licence_ titles. Each borrow by a student turns into dollars paid to an outside entity for the privilege of licensing the book. Libraries cannot give the books away or even recoup shrinking budgets by having used book sales. It’s a expenditure, through and through.

All of that, of course, is ignoring the DRM hurdles put on certain publications, which are only accessible through certain platforms. Ebooks aren’t “just like” books, only in bits. It’s a completely new market geared for one thing: making a profit.

At whose expense?