I am moving over the contents of this site and it’s feed to Teachinghacks.com, the new feed will be http://www.teachinghacks.com/feed/

Tech Musings is also being renamed to Teaching Hacks. The title change is also a shift in focus to broader ideas with regards to using different utilities, software, web applications in the classroom. The title teachinghacks is a word play on the meme lifehack. Pulling on the idea of helping teachers by using simple tools and ideas.

Please update your bookmarks and feed readers.

Happy new year!

First, I love my del.icio.us account. Second, it is great to use foxylicious extention in Firefox because it synches up my bookmarks on the different computers that I work from. Finally, RSS is awesome.

If you haven’t started using social bookmarking tools:

Create an account at del.icio.us(http://del.icio.us/) or Furl(http://www.furl.net/) to store, sort and share the web sites that you feel have worthwhile in information for your students (and colleagues). Share your del.icio.us and Furl bookmarks with your class using an RSS feeds.

An RSS feed can be found on the bottom of almost every page within del.icio.us. You can use your inbox to subscribe to other people’s feeds or by tag. The inbox merges all of these feeds together into a central feed. This central feed will keep track of all the bookmarks people are adding to the community that I have flagged.

You will find my feed at: http://del.icio.us/qdsouza

Danny over at TILT inspired my to start a Frappr map for those of you that are reading Tech Musings. So if you are interested in joining my Frappr map it can be found in the side bar.

I like that the map I created has it’s own RSS feed and that it supports tagging, but it is definitely a social networkinjg tool. You can look at Frapper once you signup at Local.Frapper. You can see restaurants and clubs/bars and shopping areas that other members have recommended. As well as what other Frappr members are in your area, with People.Frappr.
Frappr is one of those great mash-ups using Google maps open API to create a social networking tool.

I was looking over towards Kitchener and Guelph using Frappr because I have a meeting in the area early next year. I came across a Frappr member had added local history pegs to the google map around the Kitchener area. What a neat idea? Why not add local history pegs all over Toronto? Students investigating the history of the area in their social studies classes, putting down pegs to show people who might be interested in the area the local history, by using a social networking tool to leverage the power of groups students work would be valued by many travellers or at least by people like me how have to go to meetings in other cities. Another by-product is that you can switch to satelliete view because we are dealing with Google maps, and if the map is available get a better look at the area.

I just added this neat tool to the sidebar on this blog - feed2podcast which I found on Vincent’s blog “A Feed is Born“. It takes the rss feed of your blog and converts it to audio. So all your postings have their own audio feed to go along with the text feed. This is a nice tool for converting your blog into a audio, but I would definitely not call in podcasting.

Here’s “Tech Musings” audio and rss feed via feed2podcast.

Podcasts are a richer experience, more like radio shows rather than simple audio files. Perhaps to make it more podcast like it would be nice to add some sort of personal intro to the audio file. The computer voice is decent, but it would have been nice to have a few voices to choose from when I create this feed and be able to tag into my posts different voices for different parts of a post. So if I did an interview I could have different voices for each person in the interview. Hopefully there will be a way to get rid of the promo ad for feed2podcast at the end of each audio file too. (Really - any audio editor can clip the ad)

What is really cool though is some of the educational implications when you can quickly convert ANY text to an audio file, all you need is a disposiable blog with an RSS feed that is including complete postings. So if you have online text put them in a posting, convert them to audio and download to your mp3 player. The implications are endless - stories for students, web site instructions, articles, maybe make your own audio books for your class.

I can see this really coming in useful for students who are struggling with reading, and are able to listen along to blog postings.

Consider a class of students that are blogging. By merging a set of student blog feeds, say of a Math Journal, into a single feed a teacher can get a feel if the content that you are trying to delivery or the point you are trying to get across in your classroom.

You might also be able to identify gaps in the knowledge of these students and see what is specifically interesting to them in the classroom.

Finally, it is just convienent to have all the feeds aggregated in a central location for both you and students to view new postings.

Take a look at http://allrss.com/rssremixers.html for a list of RSS Mixers.