Classpress.net: Headlines for School Subjects

A list of RSS feeds that provide daily postings for subject teachers: today's view shows Art, Design & Technology, English, Geography, History, Maths, Music, Science.

New on this page: Following + subscribe

I've just added a couple new things to my side panel: A Followers box and a new Subscribe link to replace the atom-feed link I had before. Both of these should make it SUPER-EASY for you to subscribe and keep track of What's New in PinkFlamingo's Resource Lists!

What's "Following"?

If you use Google Reader: After you click Follow, you'll see a folder in Reader called "Blogs I’m Following".

If you have a blogger.com site, you'll see the sites you follow in your dashboard.

More details in Blogger Help.

You can choose to follow anonymously (so your profile pic won't show up in my Followers box) or publicly. (Of course, I'd enjoy the public option, especially if I get a lot of Followers to show off here. ;)

Quotations Book: search engine + much more

Quotations Book.com: A specialized search engine for quotations on the Internet. Lost of "extras", including a Facebook app; quotes of the day by RSS or email, for mobiles, & as a Firefox extension; starter page code for iGoogle, Pageflakes, & Netvibes; a widget to put on your website or blog; widgets for Windows Vista & Macs; a daily podcast; and more.

SpokenText - Free online text to speech converter

Spoken Text records from PDF, Word, plain text, PowerPoint files, RSS news feeds, emails and web pages, and convert them to speech automatically. The files are saved as MP3s so you can listen to them on your favorite audio device.

"Our goal is to make the conversion of text to speech as simple as possible and in so doing make it accessible to everyone. The vast majority of the technology we use in our daily lives are way too complicated and overwhelms us with unneeded options and features. To this end we focused on providing a quick and simple way to convert your text content into spoken audio, for listening to on an iPod or your computer."

Dapper

"Dapper is a free, web-based service that enables users to easily create an interactive feed from any website for consumption on any platform: RSS reader, iGoogle, enterprise mashup, mobile phone, etc. Users can make a dynamic feed (API) that changes based on user input for any website. With Dapper, anyone can create RSS feeds, universally embeddable widgets, and XML (among other formats) for any website." [from Answers.com]

See this short demo video that illustrates how easy it is to make a "Dapp".

Dapper Facebook AppMaker:

"Turn any website into a Facebook application -- no programming required!" "Use your own header, footer, background styling — really make it yours — and with absolutely no programming. If you can make a Dapp, you can make a Facebook app."

Reuters reports from Second Life

Reuters of London have assigned a bureau chief, Adam Pasick, to a full time job reporting from inside Second Life! (He says it's difficult to explain his full time job to his mother/grandmother :) This site, complete with RSS feed, is filled with news, blog, videos, audio & video interviews with a range of Second Life subjects, Second Life Business News and Economy reporting, including a dollar value & daily spending charts, a Dollar/Linden currency converter, and lots more, all directly from Second Life. Of course, there's also a Reuters office tower in Second Life.

See this video report from CBC [note: you may be asked to install DivX to view it, but that's all Good!]. Complete with action videos taken inside Second Life, it's an excellent overview of what Second Life is growing to mean and do in our world. As a non-Second Lifer (I bet they have a word for us 'outside world' people?), I thought this video was one of the most informative I've seen so far. I've been told it costs money to "film" scenes from inside Second Life, so I guess this video is like an exclusive treat, courtey of CBC News and Reuters.

RSS in Plain English

RSS in Plain English: Thanks to Lee and Sachi Lefever, who shared the code to display the following video. "We made this video for our friends (and yours) that haven't yet felt the power of our friend the RSS reader. We want to convert people... if you know someone who would love RSS and hasn't yet tried it, point them here for 3.5 minutes of RSS in Plain English."

Click To Play

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start.

Free Academic Podcasts

This site has a list of 145 (to date) links. Says the site author: "About a year ago, I put together a listing 30 or 40 free podcasts of lectures from Universities. When I started putting together another list, I was amazed at how many more lectures are available. The lectures in this list are all free and don't require any type of authentication--you don't have to be a student to download them. The links are to the rss feed of class lectures. If you copy the URL and in iTunes click on Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast it will automatically download the lectures and new ones as they become available."

More Podcast sites

Podmatic: "Create, find & send podcasts" Lots of categories to browse/use, including an Education category containing hundreds of podcasts and other links. "...podcasting has traditionally been restricted to the crafty, tech-savvy and patient. ... many would-be podcasters are confronted with an array of technical hurdles (i.e. recording software, RSS and XML syndication, hosting, etc). ...To expedite podcasting's transition from fad to mainstream, our goal is to drop these barriers of entry for people interested in producing podcasts."

The Learning Pod: "Conversation, chat, discussion and information provided by people in education for people in education together with teachers notes."

Odeo: "Odeo is a creative way to record and share audio—and it's free. ...As a company, we believe strongly in the democratization of media. We think that giving more people powerful tools for the creation and distribution of media will result in more knowledge, ideas, art, truth, and amusement available to all."

Attensa for Outlook

Attensa for Outlook: (Quoting from allrss.com's list of windows feedreaders.)

"Works inside Microsoft Outlook to bring up-to-the-minute RSS news feed headlines and Podcast content from your favorite Websites and blogs right into neatly organized Outlook folders. Now you can stay on top of RSS news and your favorite blogs without all the surfing. Attensa for Outlook is the first RSS news reader and news aggregator for Outlook that lets you use a toolbar in your browser of choice, Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer, to easily add and manage RSS news feeds and subscriptions from Websites and blogs. And, it's the only Outlook RSS reader that automatically loads audio Podcast files into iTunes and Windows Media Player playlists."

RSS Compendium at allrss.com

A huge collection of RSS resources. You can subscribe to keep up to date with their news and additions.

RSS Readers for Windows users

Click the title to get to the list, provided by allrss.com -- then look at the rest of their site. Loaded with RSS resources.

Feed2Podcast - create a podcast out of your blog

Free sign-up for this service. The Feed2Podcast engine instantly turns your blog's RSS feed into a Podcast. See this explanation and review on Jake Ludington's MediaBlab.

50+ RSS Ideas for Educators

The title is a little misleading. The document is not just ideas, it begins with the basics -- explaining the technologies available, how they work, outlining various applications to use, illustrated tutorial on getting going, and then finally a descriptive list of ideas to get you inspired and on your way. Chock full of links to resources. EXCELLENT!

Sharing Your Media With Media RSS**

**Description: "Media RSS is a new RSS module that supplements the enclosure capabilities of RSS 2.0. RSS enclosures are already being used to syndicate audio files and images. Media RSS extends enclosures to handle other media types, such as short films or TV, as well as provide additional metadata with the media. Media RSS enables content publishers and bloggers to syndicate multimedia content such as TV and video clips, movies, images, and audio."

"With the explosive growth of podcasting, publishers are including more multimedia in their RSS feeds than ever. While the method of including media content in an RSS feed with enclosures is fairly well known, there are other methods available for including media content in RSS feeds, one of which is Media RSS. ...I'd like to think that Media RSS is going to allow RSS readers to handle media more intelligently, and take some of the burden off of publishers."

Find the right RSS reader for you

"RSS [Really Simple Syndication] satisfies a need for content producers and consumers to exchange information of common interest. Typically, these publications have been blogs, but additional content types are emerging. In this column, I describe how you can select an RSS reader that’s suitable for you and show you how to make the best of this new revolution."

Freevlog: VIDEOBLOGGING Tutorials

This site has a bunch of great tutorials! You have the choice of text tutorial, an online video tutorial, or a downloadable video. TIP: While you're there, subscribe RSS to their tutorials so you always hear about their new offerings.

• A step-by-step guide to setting up a videoblog for free.
  
  
• Making a video:
  • Using iMovie (Mac)
  • Using Movie Maker (PC)
  
  
• Compressing your video for the web, using:
  • iMovie
  • Final Cut Pro
  • Windows Movie Maker
  • Avid Free DV (edit Quicktime)
  
  
• Setting up a Blogger blog (to host your videoblogging)
  
  
• Making a screen capture from your video
  
  
• Accessing free online storage for your videos:
  • Internet Archive
  • Our Media
  
  
• Publishing/posting your video to your blog
  

Podcasts and e-Learning

Jim Delaney's podcast series "is designed to introduce you to fundamental postcasting development steps and ideas for featuring podcasts in your training initiatives." There's a supporting Flash tutorial, and you can subscribe to this podcast by using the RSS feed link.

How to get RSS feeds into WebCT courses

Here are a few methods:

• Integrating RSS feeds into WebCT courses: A blog posting from Dr. Jean-Claude Bradley, in which he provides "Jay Bhatt's 15 min presentation on integrating RSS feeds into WebCT courses" in 3 formats: mp3 podcast, screencast, and Powerpoint.
  
  
• An "Ask Dr. C" Discussion thread that includes detailed instructions. This person converts the RSS feed information to javascript and then uses that in the course.
  
  
• An "Ask Dr. C" Discussion in which users describe how they're adding Blogs/RSS to their courses.
  

Vodcastings, Screencasting or whatever you would like to call it, and WebCT.

In August I posted an entry about using WeedExporter as a way to create RSS files to "simplify the creation of files containing repetitive sections of Windows Media files metadata."

Robin Petterd has created tutorial about the way he creates videos for students, using WeedExporter as part of the process. He says it is "a system that allows me to record software demonstrations during face to face sessions with students and then deliver these to students via WebCT and RSS feeds."