I have been practicing martial arts for several years and was practicing some forms (self-defense patterns) in our family room recently. My son was with me and watched intently for a while from the couch. It wasn’t long before I heard, “Daddy, sit. Watch!” As directed, I walked over to the couch and sat down and my son moved into my practice area. As soon as I was seated, he began to simulate the movements [...]

If you use netTrekker, there are some improvements to the site for 2008. Of them all, the one that most interests me is that there are now refinement menus instead of tabs on each search result page. So what does that mean? These menus now give the user more flexibility when refining searches to find the appropriate resources. With this feature, you can select multiple options in multiple menus to really narrow the focus. Here [...]

My son recently turned two, and even at this early age he sees the world in a simple duality – “on” and “off.” When presented with something new, his little hands turn the object over and over while his eyes carefully examine the surface. If he can’t find a button or a switch, he lifts his head up toward me, and with a voice that combines the tone of both a request and a command, [...]

As of this writing, I will admit that I still don’t know a lot about Microsoft Word 2007. But what I do know is that this version of Word has a built in tool that allows me to connect with my blog and post entries without opening a web browser and logging into my site. WOW! Finding this feature was an accident. It was while searching for a newsletter template in something formerly known as [...]

You are doing a lot of good work saving important web resources to your del.icio.us account for students to access and use for classroom instruction. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could check your account for new links without having to visit your web page every time? Well, we can. There are two ways that we can accomplish this task. One way is to create a link on a web page that students can click [...]

I frequently scour the ‘Net for resources that I can use or share with other teachers, such as lesson plans, tutorials, instructional examples, etc. Recently, I was on the web trolling for more good stuff when I arrived at a page with lots of great documents in pdf format. I located the first document I wanted to download started to save the file. When that one was done, I moved on to the next, and [...]

I use Google as my primary web search engine. I am attracted by the site’s simple design, but more importantly for the powerful tools that are readily available. One workshop session I attended at the T+L conference on Wednesday afternoon reminded me of one feature that I had not used recently… Google offers users the ability to use Language Tools that can translate text typed into the original text field. In the example below, I [...]

This morning, I attended Breakfast Speaker Series on the first day of the 2007 T+L Conference. T+L stands for “technology plus learning” and the conference is sponsored by the National School Boards Association. The featured speaker was Will Richardson, a former teacher at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, N.J, and author of of the book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. I had the opportunity to listen to Will [...]