#8 (Week 4) RSS & Newsreaders

Currently I use SharpReader as my aggregate reader and I am very happy with the program. I did sign up for Bloglines to try it out, but I think I will stay with SharpReader. I currently have 17 feeds and find it hard to keep up. Through this course and other webventures I have added several feeds including:

• A Wandering Eyre


• LITA Blog


• librarian.net


• eSchoolNews


• Kathy Schrock's Kaffeeklatsch


• theFischBowl


• techlearning

The truth is I find it very difficult to stay up with all of these feeds and find that the clock often reads past midnight when I get sucked into the cyber hole created by the many great links and pieces of information.

#7 (WEEK 3) Technology

Last December (for my birthday) I got a new digital camera, the Nikon D200. I love the camera but have not yet learned even half of what it is capabilities. I love taking pictures and wanted a way to produce my pictures on DVD for others to see. My brother-in-law suggested a program called ProShow by Photodex. He has created some amazing DVDs of his family. What I love about this program is Photodex allows you to download the FULL version for 15 days

• ProShow Producer for professionals



• ProShow Gold for enthusiasts



• ProShow Standard for beginners
  
  

Another plus - You can't beat the price. The Gold version is only $70.00 and is well worth every cent.

This was not suppose to be an advertisement, I just wanted to share another way I use my digital photography.

More on Life-Long Learning

In an article entitled Teaching Life-Long Skills from Techlearning.com (July 6, 2007) Jacob Nielson, an expert on the usability of the Internet, suggests that students need Life-Long Computer Skills:

• Ability to evaluate online information
  
• Techniques for dealing with information overload


• Ability to write hyper-linked online text
  
• Ability to create presentations (and avoid bad habits!)


• Abiility to understand workplace ergonomics


• Ability to debug, the logical process of tracking down errors


• Usability basics, for making informed decisions on a product's ease of use

#3 and #4 (Week 2) Blogging - Getting Set-up

Setting up this blog was as easy as 1 - 2 - 3. However, I found a way to make this task a little more difficult as I could not decide whether to use Blogspot.com or Edublog.org (I created my 1st blog about a month ago during a workshop hosted by the Orange County Department of Education posted on edublog). So of course the overachiever that I am I created a blog in both places to see how each worked. I also wanted to know which site would work best through our firewalls (we have a wonderful firewall both at the district and county that block just about everything). The difficultly came with keeping track of the site names, passwords, and log-in areas for administrative needs. After reviewing the two sites I decided to stick with Blogspot.com as it was the recommendation of the School Library Learning 2.0 program.