My Summer Reading List

I’ve been looking at a lot of lists out there and am working on getting my summer reading list going – the six below are the ones I want to read most!

• Beyond Discipline by Alfie Kohn
• Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton Christensen
• The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson
• Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson
• Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative by Ken Robinson
• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Here are two lists I found helpful:

• NPR’s Summer Books 2009
• Read Like Your Hair’s on Fire: An Educator’s Summer Reading List

What is on your summer reading list?

Technorati Tags: summer reading list education instructional technology reform creativity

Head Aches and Geek Things that Excite Me

This has been a crazy week. It all started last Thursday afternoon. Our email system went offline because of a hard drive failure. I knew then it would not be up the next day. That is when my headache started. Saturday and Sunday, our email was sporadic, but I thought the worst was over. Monday morning rolls around, and our email is still down. My head ache returns.

By Tuesday, our email system has been moved to a new server but we were still having issues with outbound mail. Most of that was solved before the end of the day. Finally on Wednesday my headache subsided and I felt that I could show my face it public again.

By now it is quite obivous I have nothing to write about. So, I am just going to share some things that have excited me.

1. The Dell Latitude 2100 Education Netbook. I am not a big fan of netbooks for me personally, I prefer my laptop and iPod Touch. I see the benefits for education. Dell has released a special netbook for education. I want a set and it has been a long time since I have said “I want” and “dell” in the same sentence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvPb0nQEt_U

2. The Palm Pre. Our cell phones are on the Verizon network and I am not happy with the selection. BlackBerry is not an options. Saturday, June 5th, Palm is releasing their newest phone the Pre. It is only on Sprint, but Verizon already let the cat out of the bag and said they will be carrying the Pre in 6 months.

3. Apple’s WWDC. On June 8th, Apple will most likely be talking about the new iPhone. There have been rumors of it being available on Verizon, but I am not holding my breath. I am still excited to see what the updates are and when I can get them on my iPod Touch.

5. Twitter: I am a bipolar twitterer. Sometimes I love it and think it is great, other days it is just a distraction. Today I am liking it. I especially like this video out of UT Dallas. I would have loved a classroom like this growing up. I would never raise my hand or participate in a discussion in school, but I would have participated like this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WPVWDkF7U8

It is a good time to be a geek.

Reading on my iTouch

I am really enjoying reading on my iTouch and I have to say that I was a “paperdork"(Aaron’s fabulous term) before I downloaded Stanza on my iTouch.  Stanza is a free reader for your iTouch/iPhone.  I’ve tried out many different free apps on my iTouch but Stanza for me is the best.  The only thing I don’t love is that you can’t annotate text yet but I know many users have asked for that function.

I especially like that while in Stanza you can download ebooks right to your iTouch/iPhone with their Online Catalog.   The Online Catalog links to many different online sites but by far my favorite has been Feedbooks. 

Feedbooks is a universal e-reading platform compatible with all mobile devices where you can download thousands of free e-books, publish and share your own content, and create customized newspapers from RSS feeds and widgets.

One of the other great things (thanks Kim) to do with Stanza is to use ePub2Go to convert your PDFs.  You simply go to the ePub2Go site and either upload or link to a PDF you want.  Once you have uploaded your PDF and it has been converted you will get an option: “I'd like an e-mail sent to my iPhone so that I can download the book to Stanza.” Then you just open your email, click on the link, and the PDF is downloaded into Stanza. 

Also don’t forget to check out some free manuals to add to your iTouch/iPhone using ePub2Go from http://the-manuals.com/.

Links:
Stanza - http://www.lexcycle.com/
Feedbooks - http://www.feedbooks.com/
ePub2Go - http://www.epub2go.com/
The Manuals - http://the-manuals.com/

Technorati Tags: ebooks,stanza,feedbooks,epub2go,itouch,iphone,ereader,instructional,technology

<-- Cross posted from http://katiechristo.edublogs.org -->