About The Top 101
Welcome to the latest incarnation of the Top 101!
2006 marked the tenth anniversary of this collection being on the web. The basic idea remains the same, a relatively managable, annotated list of web resources for use in teaching and learning. But there are a few changes.
Now the site is being powered by WordPress, software that is normally used for blogging. For me, that means things will be easier to manage. For you, it means the site will be updated far more frequently and there is now a search tool to make things easier to find.
The Top 101 is not intended to be a comprehensive directory of instructional web sites. These pages make up a highly personal and very opinionated list of the 101 best web sites for use by teachers and students in K-12 classrooms. To avoid having one very loooooong page, I have divided the list into ten, again very subjective, categories (plus a few extras).
If you count the links on these pages very carefully – then you need something else to do with your life! But you will also find more than 101 links. I guess that makes me guilty of false advertising, but so what? I just needed a catchy name for these pages.
So, who am I? My name is Tim Stahmer and I created this site and – as they say in the TV news biz – I am solely responsible for the content. I am an Instructional Technology Specialist for the Fairfax County Public Schools, which is physically located just outside of Washington, DC. Part of my job involves helping teachers, administrators and students better use the technology in their classrooms and offices. Of course, part of that technology includes using the internet in the curriculum.
A little something for the lawyers: The web site descriptions and other written materials on these pages are my own and are licensed under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5). Also, recommendations of web sites, books, software or other materials on this site should not imply an endorsement by my employer. We don’t agree much of the time anyway. :-)
Please feel free to write me with any suggestions, corrections, ideas, complaints or compliments. One of the neat things about running your own web site is hearing from the people who are looking at and (hopefully) making good use of the information.
So, why create this site in the first place. Two reasons: People both in and out of my teacher training classes kept asking “What are the best sites on the web?” and they weren’t happy when I tried to explain that there are many good sites depending on your needs. So I tried to assemble a manageable list of the best web sites for education and what better way to “publish” them but on the web itself (and save a few trees!).
The second reason for this site is that I also teach web publishing classes (the School Webmaster section contains much of my teaching materials) so this site became a way to demonstrate web publishing and learn more about it myself.
If you’re interested in creating your own web site, it’s really not that hard. The real magic of the World Wide Web is that you don’t have to be the Wizard of Oz to create useful and fairly decent looking pages (I submit myself and this site as evidence). All you need are a reason for publishing, good content and some good tools.
