Phillip Torrone over at Make: Blog has found a site with instructions for making customized Google Maps the easy way. Well, relatively easy anyway. You’ll still need to know something about HTML, but Chris Houser‘s “How to Use Google Maps EZ” makes it about as simple as possible until someone creates a point-and-click application to do it. Unfortunately, making a map of my district’s schools is still languishing on my to do list.
Google is now officially supporting RSS feeds for its news service. Besides feeds for their news categories, you can generate a custom feed for any Google News search. This was possible before, but my understanding is that it was a 3rd party solution and not officially supported. It’s nice, if not a bit late, to see Google embrace this. I’ll continue to use Technorati to track what the blogosphere has to say about particular topics, but this will be a handy way to follow the same stories from the traditional press viewpoint. And you can be pretty specific. I could, for example, subscribe to a feed of New York Times articles that mention renewable energy (RSS). Any search you can construct with their advanced search can generate a feed. What teacher couldn’t find a use for this?
Rich Trouton has published his review of Apple’s built-in Blojsom-based blog server. I’m planning to entice a teacher or two to give blogging a try this year using the blogging capabilities of our OS X server. I love the ability to control access to the blogs using the server’s access control lists. I’ll have more to say about this once the year is underway and I can get a real look at the system in action.
Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia fame) is doing a guest stint at lessig blog while Lawrence Lessig is away. He’s making a top ten list of things that will be free someday and puts a free curriculum on the list at #2.
I’m not sure why there would be just one free curriculum. It’s not like teachers do all their curriculum shopping in one place anyway. Rather than a master repository somewhere, it seems much more likely that teachers will continue to look all around for the best materials available. Making it easier to find those materials sounds like a worthy goal to me.
Well I’m really official now. I submitted my podcast to Apple’s iTunes yesterday and it is now available. (Just do a search for “savvy technologist” to find it.) I know that most of you who are subscribed to my podcast at this point are probably just subscribing to my entire RSS feed and letting your podcast aggregating software pull out the audio enclosures. In an effort to track my podcast subscriptions more closely I created an account at Feedburner and am publishing a podcast-only feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/technosavvy/podcast. If you’ve subscribed to my podcast via the old feed address, please consider resubscribing using the new Feedburner one. It will really help me find out how many people are listening.
You can also find my podcat at Odeo. Odeo is one of the many upstate companies that is attempting to gain a foothold in the podcasting market. They are developing a browser-based tool called Odeo Studio for recording and publishing podcasts that looks pretty interesting. That could be a real step forward in the ease of use department, but time will tell.
Enough talk about podcasting, it’s time to make one. Stay tuned.
If I haven’t posted anything in a few days it has mostly to do with the fact that I’ve been spending much of my evening time figuring out and playing with my new “home studio.” Although I haven’t posted many podcasts yet, I feel comfortable in the interview format and I needed to figure out a way to record Skype conversations. After working with Hugo Schotman’s design that utilizes Audio Hijack Pro, I couldn’t get rid of the latency in my headphones. (Latency is the delay introduced by the signal processing that happens as sound is routing through a system like a computer.) Thanks to Doug Kaye of IT Conversations fame, I discovered his diagram showing a method of recording Skype calls that utilizes an inexpensive portable mixer.
So here’s the current setup in the home studio. If you click on either of these photos you’ll go to Flickr to see the full-size versions. At that point you can mouse over the photos to see some annotations that I’ve added which identify the components and how they’re connected. (On a side note, and to keep this post education-related, this Flickr feature is relatively unknown and has some great potential as a learning tool.)
I’ve got some good ideas for interviews so don’t be surprised if some of you out there gets calls from me asking if you’d like to appear on the Savvy Technologist Podcast.