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 Four, Assignment #8

#8. RSS & Newsreaders. Learn about RSS feeds and set up my own Bloglines newsreader account.

I use iGoogle as my homepage, and Google Reader is readily available there with a click on a drop-down arrow. While subscribing to at least 5 newsfeeds, I discovered I could pick up RSS feeds of a "news flash" feature on my school district's Web site. I like have school news come to me that easily.

Our library supervisor took the time to have all the librarians in my district learn about Google Reader and subscribe to RSS feeds a couple years ago. She did it in preparation for our district starting to use School Center to make classroom or library Web pages, because we'd have the ability to set us an RSS feed from our own sites and she wanted us to know what they are. At that time, I found it a nuisance to sign into Google Reader, and I found there was too much worthless information coming to me through the RSS feeds, so I canceled the subscriptions.

When I started to use iGoogle about a year ago, I set up newsfeeds from major newspapers. I occasionally click on an interesting headline that I wouldn't otherwise have seen.

I've subscribed to the Unshelved library cartoon feed. There are some good cartoons about librarians using social networking groups to reach teens, and about appealing to teens in Library 2.0.

I set up an account in Bloglines.