I’m a HUGE fan of Google Earth. Ever since the terribly buggy and laggy days of its first incarnations, I’ve used the resources provided by it, oogled monumental structures from space, and found ways to encourage teachers to use it more in their classroom. Sometimes I get pushback from teachers wanting a resource that’s more accessible to students, doesn’t require the internet, and will always be there even if the...

On February 11th, 2012, I woke up to 13 inches of fresh snowfall. The night before my driveway had all of half an inch of snow on it, and I was shocked to say the least! What multiplied my amazement even more was that an extremely narrow band of lake effect snow (no more than 5-10 miles across) was dumping this snow on my poor little town along Lake Michigan at an alarming rate. By the end of the event we had over 20 inches of snow on the...

The science teacher in me knows what’s going to happen in the video above before the cannonball is dropped into a vat of the silvery liquid metal, but the curious learner in me still squeals with delight when the cannonball actually floats! I’m a HUGE fan of trying to provide discrepant events for my students, whether it’s science based or not, and while I also advocate that it’s best to have a live demonstration...

In my never ending quest to find an engaging way to bring the real world into the classroom, I captured some video of my children and I playing with one of those massive rolling granite sphere water fountains. I’ve never really been intriqued by the tiny little desktop versions of these fountains, where a small amount of water is able to “float” a tiny granite sphere the size of a baseball, and then allow it to rotate...

Pssst! Don’t tell anyone, but I’m secretly becoming addicted to Vimeo, and videos like this one don’t do anything to help me cope with it. I’m a HUGE fan of finding short media to help illustrate a concept, inspire students, or challenge learners to try something they may never have attempted before. It’s rare that I can find a video that does all three, but I believe I’ve found one in this incredibly...

While I try to keep the thoughts that I share here on my blog positive and upbeat, too often I find myself feeling bitter and stone-hearted at the amount of “fluff” being tossed around the edu-blogosphere. While thousands of blog posts are tweeted and bookmarked about how “stupefyingly awesome” new website “X” is, it can be hard to find the proverbial “diamond in the rough” that combines both...