This weeks technology Blog of the week is The Savvy Technologist "Great teaching and learning with technology". The Savvy Technologist is a Blog hosted by Tim Wilson that focuses on integrating technology with an emphasis on learning and teaching. Looking back through the Savvy Technologist archives Tim seems to have been blogging for a very long time (in Blogging terms) with the earliest post I could find being in September 2003 where Tim launched a thought provoking article called Blogging for learning which starts:

"Imagine having a Web-based writing system that any person could use without knowing any HTML. Imagine having your students getting instant feedback from their peers as they develop a writing assignment. Imagine communicating with your students’ parents or the larger community by sending an email and having it displayed on your Web page. Imagine your students developing a group project and gathering information and feedback from others around the world and having their final product published on the Internet."

Let’s start by checking the Blog Juice rating from the Blog Juice Calculator at http://www.text-link-ads.com/blog_juice/. The Savvy Technologist achieves a very respectable 3.6 supported largely by over 700 blog lines subscribers and a very good Technorati ranking of 104,933 (with 106 inbound links).

The site itself, at the time of checking, is a 3 column layout using a simple and clear design which allows important elements, such as the all important site subscription feed, to really stand out and even better there are no adverts (that I could find) so all screen real estate is available for Tims posts. Whilst in recent times there are only a few posts per month Tim has a natural flowing writing style and his recent article TIES 2007: Policies 2.0, Rules for the Social Web is very useful including a link to ConnectSafely which is a discussion forum dedicated to safety on the Web. Another interesting Blog post entitled MEMO 2007: Podcasting Nuts and Bolts talks about Podcasting and usefully Tim gives an overview of the equipment  he uses to produce his pod cast. It’s always great to see what people use to achieve tasks like this so it is well appreciated. I have seen online file conversion utilities before but Zamzar which Tim talks about in his article Handy online file converter can convert a whole bunch of different document types. Zamzar has a page on the documents it can convert on its Conversion Types page – something for the utility toolbox. Another thought provoking article called TIES: The Influence of Teacher Beliefs talks about technology integration from an angle that I don’t see very often- how preconceptions of an individual can impact their actions especially when their actions are in conflict with their preconceptions – at least that’s what I read into it !

The Savvy Technologist can be found at http://technosavvy.org/ and is definitely worth checking out.

If you are aware of a great technology Blog that should be considered for the Technology Blog of the Week either leave a comment or email me with the details.