Wonderful Resource in the Making

This summer I vowed to get in shape. Walking the halls and pacing the classroom just don’t cut it. I like to walk in the morning before it gets too hot and humid. Today I cued up one of my favorite professional development podcasts, PFT, Podcast for Teachers, Techpod, episode 85. This episode is 50 minutes long so I new I’d get some great exercise for brain and body thanks to Dr. Kathy and Mark who host this program.I was very interested to hear about their friend in Asia, Chris Smith. He is taking all of the great web-based teacher resources and harnessing them in a new way.

Out in cyberspace you find numerous podcatchers like itunes, ippoder etc. You even find directories of podcasts designed to collect educasts as resources. What you haven’t been able to find until now is a way to subscribe to a topic and receive all of the relevant related podcasts, vodcasts and blog posts as they are added. Chris has done just that. This is a fantastic idea. Here’s how you apply the concept to your classroom. Take a topic, such as earthquakes and check Chris’s listing in the Shanbles Forest of ‘Theme BLOGS’. The listing is a table and next to each topic are several links. The orange link will give you the feed information. You can copy and past this into any feed reader you use.

If you are unfamiliar with feed readers and how they are able to collect recent posts from all of the blogs you like to follow, then you must do a search on feedreader or go to www.technorati.com or www.feedburner.com. The other button will take you directly to the blog page containing all of the posts. Remember a post can be in any form, audio, video or text or any combination. The wonderful thing about blog posts is that they are archived by date.

If you are currently a podcaster or perhaps you have produced material that could be posted as a resource then you should consider sharing it here. Personally I think this repository has more promise than teachertube. Of course you can post you content in both places. Check it out and let me know what you think of the possibilities.

clipped from www.shambles.net   The Shambles Forest of ‘Theme BLOGS‘ (a feedback form is in the top left menu) This page offers a list of the “Theme BLOGS” that started growing all around the outside of the Shambles website in March 2007 … in much the same way as a forest might grow around a township. In the first instance these Blogs showcase online (free) videos that support a particular theme but they may well evolve into other content and media. So why use Blogs rather than the regular webpages on Shambles for this particular growth? mainly because of the social aspect of Blogs which allows visitors to leave comments and suggestions on any or all postings also for the ability to subscribe to individual Blog pages using RSS in order to be automatically informed of new additions … and eventually save you time

tags:
edtech, education, kathy shields, ripplingpond, Podcast for Teachers 2007,educast,shambles