In this talk the speaker will illustrate the following ideas that were found to be among most important in achieving effective physics teaching: 1. Effective teaching should engage students in active construction and testing of ideas. Traditional teaching in most cases does not create opportunities for the students to actively construct and test their own ideas. Active construction and testing are important steps in achieving understanding. 2. Teaching in context can significantly increase the motivation for learning. Creating meaningful context that is perceived as relevant by the learner will help students connect new ideas to existing knowledge. Creating stories is a key part of learning. 3. Multiple representations enhance student learning. Helping students represent ideas in multiple ways is an effective teaching technique. Those representations include words, real experiments, images, diagrams, graphs, videos, simulations, humor, etc. Here, modern technology opens new possibilities. All these ideas will be presented through examples and simple experiments.