You probably know by now that BlogHer has joined the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge for 2008.  To do my part for the cause and as a tribute to my love of handbags, I decided to have a handbag raffle.  For a $10 donation to any one of the very worthy projects on my Megan's Minute Handbag Raffle Giving Page you'll buy yourself an opportunity to win the stylish tote pictured below.  And more importantly, you'll be doing something to help public school students learn.

This week, I'm finding some of the best writing in the academic blogosphere that I've seen in a long time. See, there's an excellent meme making its way around the academia and education blogosphere: "Why I teach history." The responses on some blogs have been so terrific and, I think, important that I thought I'd offer a round-up here.

In a comment on my recent post "Tech tools for teachers," Virginia Debolt asked why more K-12 schools and universities weren't turning to open-source course management systems like Moodle instead of WebCT or Blackboard. I'm not a Moodle user, so I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable than I am about Moodle will jump in and answer that specific question. My understanding is that Moodle may be better suited to the K-12 market than to university users, although certainly many colleges and universities are using Moodle. If you're interested, you can check out Moodle's own statistics on its popularity, and you can see a list of institutions where there's at least one instructor using Moodle. The bigger question--one I am very willing to tackle--is whether a course management system is an appropriate solution at all.

What tools are today's tech-savvy teachers using? Recently, many edubloggers have filled us in on their favorite tools.