Thing 20 - Podcasts 2

I took a look at the Education Podcast Network, and clicked into Secondary school podcats. My complaint here is that the titles are not helpful, and they are not organized by subject, so I feel as though I am blindly clicking in (also, several were not available when clicked on). There were also only 20 listed under Secondary schools. I then tried Podcast Alley. I was pleased to see that it as possible, as you suggested, to browse by genre- however, under Government, for instance, it showed 18 podcasts, but once you entered the gov't section, there was actually only one. The fact that they are not specifically created for educational purposes, as you mentioned, creates another obstacle here. In thinking about podcasts, it seems to me that I might not be specifically searching for podcasts. The point is, if I come across them, for instance, within our subscription databases, I will not be intimidated. I used my itunes to subscribe to three NPR podcasts. I am getting on a plane to L.A. tomorrow and will listen to: NPR's Culturetopia, NPR's Books and NPR's StoryCorps! It was Easy Peasey, as they say..... I can also see the benefit in learning to create one, and will try to do so this year, using Audacity, to perhaps create a booktalk for an English class.

Thing 19 - Podcasts

Can I first of all say that I just LOVE the CommonCraft videos- they are so perfect in every way! Absolutely anyone can understand the Plain English videos. They should have them for everything.....I could not get the Great Educational Podcast videos to work, so I just went on to explore podcasts. (It is, as we speak 90+ degrees outside, and it is 4pm- I am tired and hot. Why am I telling you this? You'll see...) What a pleasure to choose an NPR podcast, and stretch out on the couch in the AC with my eyes closed! I listened to NPR's Culturetopia, http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=89697153 and loved it. I plan on subscribing to a few, and figuring out how to download them onto my Ipod, which I have so far used only for music. I also checked out the vocab minute from the Princeton Review: http://feeds.feedburner.com/princetonreview -that is DEFINITELY going on my library homepage! I also listened to booktalks for students at http://nancykeane.com/booktalks/podcast_list.htm What a great way to have students recommend books to each other- I am going to start podcasting with English classes this year! I then listened to an Internet Safety podcast http://www.internetsafetypodcast.com/ with the author of a book called Ethics in the Information Age. It was 40 mins. long, though, and I can't imagine teachers sitting that long without something to look at. (Teachers are the worst audiences, in my opinion!) This is another great Thing as far as I am concerned!

Thing 18 - Slideshare

I will definitely do some digging here and see what may be helpful to use with information literacy/research classes (boy, Shift Happens is OVERWHELMING!!!!). I did creat an account and plan to upload a powerpoint that I use with Public Speaking classes on how to be a good presenter. In the meantime, I will embed a popular slideshow with some incredible paper sculptures....perhaps this is what we will do with all of the paper that we no longer use since we collaborate online with Web 2.0 :)

Astonishing Paper Sculptures from Jeff Nishinaka

View more presentations from Nubia ..

Thing 17 - Productivity Tools

As I mentioned in another post, I use LibraryThing and love it. However, I have private settings. I think it would be more useful to make my tags and bookmarks public- perhaps I could link to them within my research pathfinders. I think I'm ready to take that next step.

As for trying new things, I signed up for Remember the Milk, which bills itself as a task organizer. I loved the title, to start with! I am feeling overwhelmed with getting one daughter off to college this weekend while we also pack for a trip to visit my other daughter in L.A.- I thought that two task lists would help me feel less overwhelmed- NOT TRUE! The site is not very user-friendly- you have to dig for a "how to", and the FAQ page went on forever- no thanks!

I then tried Trailfire, thinking that it would be useful for classes to create an annotated web trail. I just didn't find the site useful. It was not easy to search existing trails by subject area- they did have a tag cloud, but there were some really bizarre (as well as really obscure) tags. I did click into a few random ones, including a Webkins trail- there was nothing new or unusual, only 5 sites and one was Wikipedia. I can't see how I would send students here.

Maybe I'm just not having an open mind, but, with all the new tools I am learning, I don't see the need for looking for more- it's interesting to know so many are out there, but I feel as though my plate is full as it is. I am interested, though, to see several whiteboard presentation site links- I do not presently have a whiteboard in the library, but in the future would like to see that added- in that case, I will explore these. (Matt- it would be good to keep this blog up and running so that we can have access to these links down the line!) I also hope to utilize the calendar options in our district email this year- so the need for additional calendar productivity tools would not make sense. It makes better sense to utilize the ones that we have in place with district email.

Thing 16 - Google Docs

I have used google docs with our collaborative work on WITLS, so I have some practice with it. In order to practice, I uploaded a file with interview questions that I would share with a group of people on an interview committee, asking them to review the questions and add other pertinent questions. I can see this being a great help, and will definitely use it more now that I am comfortable with it. I created a spreadsheet of favorites, and shared it with my family members. Not sure who I'll hear back from- if they do not have a google account, can they access it and edit? If they are too busy to stop and create an account, they may not get right back to me. We'll see....
As for using this in school, it's a no-brainer for committee work. I also will try using the Windows 2007 feature this year with the Publishing software. The Journalism class uses Publisher to create their newsletters, and I need to get up to speed in order to help them.

Thing 15 - RSS 2

I think it was a smart thing to make this cleanup another "thing", or else I would have never gotten back here and seen just what it can do. My only complaint is that the subscription area in the left column is scrunched down at the bottom and I am not sure what the rest of the stuff above it is used for! I'd rather have my subscriptions all up at the top.

I subscribed to a Google Alert for "Rules of Engagement", a televison show that my daughter just started working on. Much that came up was related to the war in Afghanistan, so I had to add "television" to the alert. I read through the rest of my subscriptions, and decided to unsubscribe to 2 or 3 of them. I also went into "Manage subscriptions" to create folders for the following: family, news, library/tech, and books. I find that much of Google Reader is intuitive- I have been able to figure it out without needing instructions.

I subscribed to a Delicious tag for "Journalism", as I will be working with that class this year for the first time. This tag may be too general- I may have to narrow it, we'll see. When I clicked on the orange feed widget at the bottom of the page it did not take me right to Google Reader, as the video showed. It said I was subscribed, but in order to have it show up in Google Reader, I had to cut and paste the URL. It was good to remember that that there is more than one way to do things - that is usually the case with most things! I also subscribed to NYT news headlines. I plan on taking a look at many of my email newsletters to see if I can switch them over to subscriptions in Google Reader. This seems to be the way to go! Rather than being overwhelming, it can actually help to manage too much information in one place. (on a side note, I read two book reviews that looked great, and am ordering the books for the high school library: one is called "Rewired: Understanding the igeneration and the way they learn" by Larry D. Rosen, PhD).

Thing 14 - Delicious

As I mentioned in thing 13, I already had a Delicious account. I may decide, though, to start from scratch, as I uploaded all of my bookmarks and am going through the process of adding tags and deleting sites that are no longer helpful. It would be great if Delicious automatically deleted non-working sites, but I don't think that is the case...I also need to play with adding the buttons to my browser- I use Mozilla, mostly, at school, and Internet Explorer at home. I also have Vista at home (ugggghhh!!!) and it has way too many obstacles for web 2.0. I do, however, love Delicious. I also use LibraryThing for social bookmarking- it is a web catalog of books that I have read, and I can add tags and see what other users suggest. It is great- I highly recommend it.