Teach42

I’ve been quiet lately due to getting ready for vacation. We’re heading off to Iowa City for Christmas and then we go straight to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. I’m very excited, my first real time off in about a year. Anyway, I whipped off this podcast while a switch was being replaced at work. Last one of the year, so I hope you enjoy it! Happy Holidays everyone and a happy New Year!

Show Notes:

New York Times article about advertising on the web.
University of British Columbia article about podcasting and education. Pretty basic, but a good read.
Yawncasting: Alan’s commentary about Podcasting from Cogdogblog.
Drawings about blogging!: Anne Davis’ students drew some pictures about podcasting!

Another ‘cast hits the airwaves! I’ve changed the format slightly. For this podcast, I’m focusing in on a single piece of social software, del.icio.us. For the next few podcasts, I’m going to try to key in on a single site or piece of software and really go into it in depth. You know, provide some tips and tricks as well as give the educational spin on it. Let me know what you like it or if you think I should go back to covering more topics in a shorter amount of time with less depth. I’d love to hear what people think. Anyway, enjoy!

Directly link for all you old fashioned folks!

Show Notes:

Keith Chapman: The background music for today’s ‘cast. “A funk jazz instrumental using all electric bass guitar and a complex drum track.”
del.icio.us: A social bookmarking tool.
Foxylicious: A Firefox extension that integrates your del.icio.us bookmarks into your browser.
Extisp.icio.us: A visual representation of the tags in your del.icio.us account. Check out mine as an example!
Backing up Del.icio.us: A quick howto for backing up del.icio.us. Way more information than you probably need. Basically if you go to http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all it will ask for your name and password, and then spit out an XML file with all your bookmarks.
Cocoalicious: An OSX desktop app for adding to and organizing your del.icio.us account.
Nutri.itio.us: In my mind, the best way to post to del.icio.us. It supplies you with a new bookmarklet that allows you to see how other people tagged the same site, and shows you which tags you already have in common with popular ones. I use this all the time.
Pasta: A quick way to take any text, create a web page out of it and bookmark it in del.icio.us. A great way to make notes of snippets of code, or other things you don’t want to forget about and want access to from multiple computers.
Add del.icio.us to your blog: Haven’t tried this one yet, but it’s a way to add your del.icio.us bookmarks to your sidebar. You’ll probably see it here soon!
We Taste: A WYSIWYG version of pasta. This one is new to me. Seems to work pretty well, but needs a Firefox bookmarklet for me to make more use of it.

Found this little tidbit through Geek News Central. Appearantly Microsoft tried to shut down a site called MacSlash, because someone posted a comment containing a possible Longhorn serial number 8 months ago. Instead of doing the logical thing and contacting MacSlash and asking them to delete it, they rallied their team of lawyers into action and contacted the sites hosting provider, demanding that they shut the site down.

Being the good guys that they are, digital.forest promptly got in touch with Microsoft (email reprinted with permission below the fold) with a response: No way.

Way to go Microsoft! You’ve once again managed to completely bypass the polite way of dealing with a situation like that and basically accomplish nothing more than giving MacSlash a ton of publicity. For the record, it seems like a great site, I’m glad Microsoft pointed it out to me!

I just deleted about 10 paragraphs of me venting at my Head of School. I really don’t want this blog to become a place for me to spew hostilities at people I’m upset with. Like I’ve said before, there are so many things to be positive about, why waste the bandwidth on negativitiy? So I’ve deleted it all. I’m going to leave it at this. My Head of School let me know in an email that she just doesn’t see blogs happenening here this year. She cc’d three members of the school board. In my opinion, that’s an open invitation to respond in kind. So I have sent a reply to her and those same three board members. A calm, rational reply explaining what blogs are, what my intentions are with them and how I can address every possible concern that she has had. In my opinion this can only improve the situation. Worst case scenario, nothing happens this year. That’s the situation as it stands right now anyway. Best case scenario, the board points out that my Head of School is being rather close-minded about the opportunity in front of us and puts some pressure on her to move forward. Cross your fingers and wish me luck.

On a much happier note, my fifth podcast is completely prepared. I might even record it this afternoon and post it tonight.

Alan just posted about Connotea, a new social citation and bookmarking service extremely similar to del.icio.us. It’s pretty cool, but I’m not a scientist and probably won’t use this one.

However, what I will use is his ultra cool 4 in 1 bookmark tool that he talks about at the end of the post! I have a bookmarklet for Furl and another for del.icio.us. I usually don’t use furl because I’m established in del.icio.us and the last thing I want to do is have to bookmark things twice. Basically, after reading his description of how he made his tool, I created a single bookmarklet that creates a pop up for both furl and del.icio.us when I want to bookmark a site! I love it! Yes, I still have to fill in the information for both sites, but at least it’s one less click and one less item on my browser bar. Now what else can I roll into this sucker?

Major kudos to one of our school librarians, Fredrica, for pointing out this article from the Shifted Librarian that I totally missed somehow. Basically, Jon Udell came up with a very cool little bookmarklet for local libraries.

Let’s say you’re on Amazon.com and you have your eye on Life of Pi (the book I’m currently reading). You’re considering dropping the $10.50 to buy it, but then you think to yourself, “I wonder if my local library has a copy of it right now.” If your local library carries it, and actually has it on the shelf, you could just swing by the library and pick it up instead of paying for it and waiting 3-5 days for it to arrive. So instead of clicking, Add to Cart, instead you click on the bookmarklet Jon came up with and it grabs the ISBN number from the page you were looking at, takes you to your librarie’s website and pulls up the record for the book.

Now tell me the truth, isn’t that just the coolest little thing you ever heard of?

Amazingly enough, I even found the Berwyn Public Library there, so I just dragged the bookmarklet to my browser bar and tried it out. Guess what? Works like a charm! I did it for Life of Pi and found that it’s on the shelf in the Cicero library, right around the corner from where I life! Wow. What a fantastic tool. Check it out!

Not quite sure how thrilled I am about this one. Google won it’s trademark suit with Geico. The gist of it is that other insurance companies can purchase the keywords “Geico” and “Geico Direct” and have links to their companies appear as ads along the right hand side when someone searches. My big fear is that these Sponsored Links that currently reside alont the right side may eventually creep their way into the main list of returns for the search. Like I said in my podcast, I want to make sure that searches remain as unbiased as possible, something that Google has definitely made a priority of in the past. Now that they’re a publicly traded company though, you never know when things might change. If those sponsored links start getting mixed in with the actual search returns, then things are going to get mighty confusing for students, even if they are “clearly labeled”.

I placed an order for that Sinister Dexter CD last night, and this morning I got the following email from the company I ordered it through.

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Tuesday, December 14th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as ‘Customer of the Year’. We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

I love a company that actually has fun with their form letters. They have just said, “We recieved your order and it should arrive on Dec. 14th.” Instead, they made me laugh and in return they get free advertising on my site! CD Baby.com.

Ok, even though I’m a total gadget freak, I’m trying really hard not to let gadgets and reviews of gadgets take over this blog. However, I do have to fill you in on what I think might be the coolest MP3 player on the market. You can see on my flickr feed a picture of me wearing the Oakley Thump. Yes, they’re those ultra-cool sunglasses that have an MP3 player and headphones built in. They come in two flavors, 128mb and 256mb. The 256mb also has polarized lenses and both models come in a pretty decent number of colors. I was at the mall over the weekend and stopped in at the Oakley store to try them out. I’ve heard some bad reviews of them but I have to admit I was pretty impressed. The sunglasses weren’t too heavy, quite comfortable and the music sounded great. I think most people get confused by the fact that these ear buds are NOT designed to rest inside your ear. They kind of float over your ears and sound pretty darn nice. If you have a phone call, you can just flip the ear buds up and away from your ears, and if you step inside, the shaded lenses flip up so you can continue listening to your tunes. They seemed pretty solid and I definitely got the feeling that you could job with these things on. They supposedly get about 6-8 hours on a charge and connect via USB 2.0.

Oh yeah, did I mention that they look pretty cool too? They get the teach42 stamp of approval!

I know I’ve been kind of quiet for the last few days. I’ve been sick with the stomach flu and have just recently started feeling human again. So that means a new podcast for you! For those of you listening directly, you should be using iPodder But if you insist, here’s the direct link to the MP3.

One other note. I found the custom settings for converting my aiff file to mp3, and manged to shrink my file sizes dramatically! The file size went from 25mb down to 9mb.

Show notes:
PlanetMath.org: A virtual community which aims to help make mathematical knowledge more accessible.
James Curran on Archive.org: The music from today’s podcast. “Beat Poet” was the background music, I played “I Want You Back” towards the end of the podcast.
Creative Commons: A nonprofit that offers a flexible copyright for creative work. It’s protecting this site, is it protecting yours?
The Media Drop: A list of Newspapers with RSS feeds. Incredibly useful!
Cogdogblog: Spammers beware, Alan’s gone on the offensive!
New York Times: Article about the Geico vs. Google court case.
Google Suggest“: Autocomplete for your google search.

Also, as a follow up to Podcast 3, check out Sinister Dexter’s official site. They’re the band that I used to lead into the podcast and I really think they have a fantastic sound. The lead off song on the album is called “Broadband Connection” and here’s how they describe it: “Get a bunch of techies to write some hard-core funk, and this is the slammin’ groove you get. Decidedly addictive.” I agree!