Good morning from Maine where a steady rain is washing away the last of snow that is in my yard. We're heading into the time of year in Maine that is affectionately referred to as mud season. It's going to be a good day for...
Whenever I fill up my car's gas tank I'm thankful that I don't have a car that requires high octane gasoline. What is high octane gasoline anyway? Is is really significantly better than regular unleaded gasoline? And why is gasoline "unleaded?" Those questions and more...
In yesterday's blog post about unraveling an email scam I mentioned that I used the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine as a part of that process. The Wayback Machine is a useful tool for finding out what a website looked like a given point in time...
In researching for Wednesday's post about inflation I ran across one of my old posts about Crash Course Economics. Within that thirty-six part course there is a video all about the 2008 financial crisis caused by the collapse of the housing market. How it Happened -...
As you know, I am a huge advocate for teaching students and teachers to respect copyright. To that end I always advocate for using your own media or media that is in the public domain whenever possible. So when an email with the subject line...
Yesterday morning I answered an email from a reader who was looking for some alternatives to Vialogues for annotating videos. Vialogues has been one of my go-to tools for students to use to take notes and share notes while watching a video that you share...
Mapping the Emerald Isle: a geo-genealogy of Irish surnames is an interactive map depicting the distribution of Irish surnames across Ireland according to the 1890 census. To use the same simply select a name from a drop-down menu in the list and the map will...
Last night during dinner one of my daughters asked, "what does ok mean?" My other daughter quickly followed up with, "yeah, why do we say that?" The first question we were able to answer fairly quickly and in a way that a five-year-old can understand....
If you have English Language Learners (ELLs) in your classroom and are wondering how to best support them, you’re in the right place! You can help better keep ELLs engaged in classroom conversations when you prepare them with these simple scaffolds. This doesn’t take a lot of...
