Week Nine, Assignment #21

#21. Podcasts (You don’t need an iPod!)

I found through The Education Podcast Network the Tech Teacher Podcasts that have some interesting episodes, such as this one about "Podcasting in the Classroom": http://www.garageband.com/mp3player?pe1WdjZPXLrvP2rZFO2YmFh.

I tried the California School Library "23 Things" link to http://www.podcast.net/, but it was a dead link, as was the link to Yahoo Podcasts.

I went to iTunes to use the Podcast directory to find library-related Podcasts. I found "Library Geeks" by Dan Chudnov. I'm listening to the November 14, 2008 Podcast about "Jangle", which is described as "a new specification for using the Atom Publishing Protocol with library resources." Frankly, I'm bored stiff. I guess I'm not as much of a "Library Geek" as I thought I was.

So, moving on, I tried "Teacher Librarians" by Julie (Lawrence) Darling. but found it to be just an uploaded file with the AASL 21st Century Standards -- not a Podcast at all. Then I tried "Got Books", a Podcast by middle school students about middle school books. You can use this link to get their blog page that has links to the Podcasts: http://got-books.blogspot.com/. This is not something I would subscribe to, but it does make me applaud the librarian who worked this out for her students to do!

Several years ago when I took a day-long Podcasting course for Act 48 credit, I was introduced to the Podcast Directory in iTunes and I spent time looking then for library-related Podcasts that might interest my middle school students or teachers, but I never did find any. From my hour-long exploration just now, I'd say that iTunes is not the best place for me to find Podcasts that would be of interest to school librarians.

Since I'm directed to add an RSS feed to this blogspot, I went back to where I began, the Education Podcast Network, and found what I thought was Podcast by Greg Schwartz: "Open Stacks - Home of Greg Schwartz: Promoting information access and literacy for all" and subscribed to it through the RSS feed. It turned out to be a blog rather than a Podcast, but within the blog I found the URL to get his Podcast "Uncontrolled Vocabulary", and finally [WHEW!] found, by trial & error, how to add it to this blog through an RSS feed. This last step has been the hardest challenge of this project. I have a lot of feed readers, and in the process of trying to get the Uncontrolled Vocabulary feed into this blog, I've added it to about 6 other places.

Week Six, Assignment #15

#15: Read some perspectives on Web 2.0. Future of Libraries.

I'm reading the "Away from the 'icebergs' " perspective and I agree with Rick Anderson's views on the "just in case" collection. When I do collection building and I see the areas in which my middle school library is deemed lacking, I have the sneaking feeling that no one will ever check out the books that the "collection development experts" want me to buy. I don't need a "just in case" collection when all the information my students want is on the Internet. Collection development made sense when all materials had to be print materials, but that's not how students want to obtain their information these days.

Library 2.0, for me, means using the resources available on the Web to make information accessible to my library patrons. For school libraries, there are limitations imposed by our tech department, based on receiving government funding. It is against our school district rules to be able to access email other than school district email, blogs, instant messaging, wikis -- any means by which students can send or receive personal messages from non-approved personel. As I understand it, this restriction is related to our district receiving government funding. We didn't use to have this restriction -- it's all come about in the last couple of years.

My school library is able to use Web 2.0 blogs that are made within the School Center Web platform, for which our district pays an annual fee. It supposedly helps to keep students from accessing blog topics that would not be age-appropriate. (It doesn't block YouTube, though, and students access all kinds of materials on that, so blocking teacher access to many of the Web 2.0 materials -- like blogger -- really does not make a lot of sense.)

Week Three, Assignment #7

#7. Create a blog post about anything technology-related that interests me this week.

I'm finding that this Blogger site interests me this week. I tried to use it a long time ago and was utterly frustrated with it. Then I used it again last year and had better luck with it, but I didn't feel I had enough to say to justify having a blog. This time around, I'm actually enjoying this project. I'm amazed that I can post a blog to Blogger from another site such as Flickr and have it show up here. Or maybe I posted it through e-mail. I've done so much with this blog today that I'm not even remembering everything I tried. It was a day that my school connection with the Internet went offline every few minutes and none of the photos I uploaded showed at all while I was at school, but I came home and found the pictures all looked fine.