Blog Juice for Educational Technology

I have my one of my students to thank for this, as I had no idea that Microsoft Publisher included plans for printing, folding, and customizing paper airplanes. We’ve been studying friction and it’s various forms in the classroom (sliding, rolling, and fluid), and I wanted to give them a practical example of fluid friction […]

Given this morning’s headlines about flooding in New England, and the excessive amounts of rainfall that the Midwest received over the weekend, I thought it might be of interest to any Geography or Geology teachers that use Google Earth to take a look at the real-time stream flow sensor map.
While many might think a map […]

I tried to save what would possibly be the most engaging science unit until May in hopes that it would be enough to distract my students from the increasingly good weather and help keep them focused on their learning. Thus we are studying the effects of gravity and friction, complete with science investigations about the […]

Special thanks to Falconphysics, one of the forum’s conscientious members, for sharing this amazing giveaway offer. Vernier Software & Technology is giving away a FREE Go!Temp USB Thermometer with Logger Lite software to every elementary, middle school, and high school in the United States in honor of their 25th anniversary. Quite the gift for a […]

In my infinite brilliance naivity, I had my students chart the current weather conditions at a certain time each day since we got back from Spring Break, thinking I could get them engaged by tracking a multitude of weather data they hadn’t been exposed to before. Everday at a given time they were to go […]

It’s always difficult for me to get back into blogging after a short break. I find that my mind comes up with ideas more often when I’m in the classroom teaching, and not taking a break, visiting relatives, or running errands. I digress though, as I’ve found just the jump-start I needed to get going […]

I had an idea last summer about taking the common classroom exercise of recording the daily weather and using online resources to explore weather in other areas of the country, or other nations. While I haven’t found a way to incorporate having my students record the weather in foreign countries yet, I have started using […]

I had a chance to talk with a number of educators last week at MACUL about a project I was doing with my students using the before-mentioned Stellarium software. Since my students are almost finished I thought I’d share the project concept with everyone as you may be wondering what to do once you’ve downloaded […]

The amount of creative, and free, software on the Internet amazes me. For every piece of limited, stale, and costly piece of software you find, there’s an equally fantastic, interactive, and free piece of software like Stellarium, a personal desktop astronomy program well suited for use in schools. Until I found this program mentioned in […]

There’s nothing more breathtaking than looking at the earth from an astronaut’s perspective thanks to Google’s satellite maps. Unless of course you’ve found this homebrewed version of Google Maps depicting the earth at night. I’ve often been fascinated with pictures of the Earth at night, the continents dark, but spider-webbed with the lights of urban […]

Boy, is that ever a bad title.
Regardless, I’ve been using this really neat little “widget” that allows you to view the current phase of the moon, its current percentage of full, and a link to get more moon phase info. You can view a demonstration of it on the blog I maintain for my classroom […]