We need to do more than vent

Doug Johnson recently had some good advice for teachers and librarians frustrated by their district's filtering policies. While it is good to vent about your frustrations, there are some actions that can be taken to change things.

test

I am testing Zoho Writer. It is an online word processor.

I am testing Zoho Writer. It is an online word processor.

I am testing Zoho Writer. It is an online word processor.

I am testing Zoho Writer. It is an online word processor.

Thing #23 - Summary

This has been quite a journey! I loved creating the avatar and learning about all the fun widgets that I could add to the sidebar of my blog to personalize it. I also learned some new uses for del.icio.us. Other favorite tools were the online office applications, wikis, and Flickr.

I loved the self-paced aspect of the course, but feel that participants should be given more time than 9 weeks. Of course, it could be done in 9 weeks, but in order to really explore all the tools, more time is needed.

Overall, it has been a great experience and I have learned a lot.

Week 9 - Thing #22 Free eBooks and audio books

I've known about Project Gutenberg for a long time. It's been around since 1971, before most of us had ever even heard of the Internet. I did not, however, know that there were so many other sites from which you can download free ebooks. The thing I was most interested in, though, was the audio books that are available. LibriVox would be extremely useful for students who are struggling to read those classics from the high school reading list. Understanding Shakespeare is often dependent on hearing the words, so this would be a great resource for those English classes.

Week 9 - Thing #21 Podcasting

I have used iTunes to locate podcasts before, but I was unaware that there were other podcasting search tools. The best of the ones we looked at, in my opinion, were Yahoo Podcasts
and the Educational Podcast Network (EPN). Podcast.net seemed slow and I had trouble loading several of the titles that I clicked on. I'm not very patient during the discovery process, so if I didn't hear something pretty quickly I was on to another link. I didn't like Podcastalley.com for educational purposes because some of the "featured podcasts" on the home page were not appropriate for student use, so I don't know that I would introduce it to students.

Using Yahoo Podcasts I was able to find several interesting podcasts on children's and young adult literature:

• Childrensbookradio is described as a podcast and children's book directory dedicated to sharing children's books. Its intended audience is parents, teachers and children.
• Book Voyages is a podcast about children's literature from the point of view of a school librarian.
• Kara's Free Audiobooks - I thought this was a really great idea for a podcast. Kara reads aloud from classic public-domain children's literature, and podcasts the stories for your delight and amusement!
• YA Bookcast reviews the latest and best young adult titles.

Subscribing to these podcasts with Google Reader was pretty easy, but you do have to have a little knowledge in order to do it. Yahoo Podcasts displays a subscribe button very prominently, but it directs you to login to a Yahoo account. For Bloglines or Google Reader, you have to look for the RSS feed link.

Probably the most useful podcast I found was David Warlick's Connect Learning, which I located via the EPN site. This is one that I might actually listen to on a frequent basis. Other beneficial podcasts are the ones produced by SirsiDynix on all sorts of cutting edge technology. These are great and useful as well. The problem is finding the time to listen!

Image citation:
Tanglao, Roland. "Wanna Podcast?" Roland's Photostream. 10 Sep 2007. 11 May 2005 .