I have yet to make it through a school year without finding at least one or more teachers that do a “this day in history” lesson in their classroom. Usually most of these “lessons” are a simple 5 minutes at the beginning of the day as a student, or the teacher, reads from one of […]

A while ago, Google announced that they had made all of the complete works of William Shakespeare available for searching online. While nothing noteworthy can be said about putting the works of the Bard online (it’s been done before), Google’s ability to search for specific passages and lines within each scanned text is rather helpful […]

Today the Tech Savvy Educator is officially one year old! I know, I know, one year and we’re already walking, talking, blogging, and collaborating. Just imagine what we’ll be up to during year two.
I choose June 1st of 2005 as the official launch so that I would have time to focus on blogging and community […]

I noticed that my last few posts have been focused almost entirely on Science, so I thought it was time to write about processing and mapping skills that work across disciplines. I have to thank Kevin Clark, an instructional technologist who works for our local REMC, for blogging about a fantastic new tool for allowing […]

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 […]

I know that I’ve discussed the possibility of students taking and working on notes in a collaborative effort before, but after a quick search I realized that I hadn’t yet blogged about the possibilities of students using technology to help one another focus on key points and note taking skills.
The idea has been floating around […]

For those that read the forum, you’ve probably noticed the recent entry about the Visual Thesaurus by Steve, one of our active new members that attended the MACUL session.
Thanks Steve (aka falconphysics) for providing the link to this wonderful tool. I played with the thesaurus all day yesterday before school, during breaks, and after my […]

Much hullabaloo has been made in recent months about the unadulterated, privacy-be-forgotten, and questionable use of MySpace by students, especially teenage students. In an era when older generations are consumed with the fears of identity theft and stolen credit information, students are apparently “bearing all” on their MySpace home pages, allowing every stranger, stalker, and […]

My experiences of reading during High School were mixed. As many secondary students across America do, I read many books that captured my imagination and encouraged me to seek out other works by the same author (Wells, Huxley, Hersey, Shakespeare). However, like secondary students across America, there were plenty of authors that I would not […]

I am completely at a loss for why I didn’t pick up this nifty little website from the forum sooner and blog about it. Todd, our thoughtful and resourceful Language Arts moderator, found an amazing site that lets you add a simple web poll to any blog post, website, or sidebar without having to login, […]

And with the wave of his magical Internet wand, the kind old wizard, with his rosey cheeks and ivory beard, restored Jots.com to its rightful place on the web, fixing the Tech Savvy Educator’s Fresh Links. Then, with a quick wink and a soft chuckle he went on his way to stop the foul deeds […]

I woke up this morning after travelling most of Friday and Saturday only to find that the website which hosts our Fresh Links has dissappeared. Without warning, notice, or any other indication it seems to have vanished and been replaced with some random domain parking web page in it’s place advertising for restaurants. My first […]

I know that this post has been a long time coming as I took a break from the March is reading month series almost two weeks ago, but this penultimate online reading post has arrived at last. These are just a few resources that I think would work very effectively at the secondary level, both […]