Just trying to keep up

This week I have been at Moorhead State University for a two day American History Seminar. I was lucky enough to win a spot in the Teaching American History Grant program with a focus for this year on Early American History.

Margaret Sankey, MSUM History Professor, spoke about the British perspective of pre-colonial America, and I was fascinated by the anecdotal information on the monarchy.  Everyone of the speakers was great and I learned so many new history tid-bits.  It was a good time.

In the meantime, some of you may know that I have been pursuing the possibility of a new job in a library, and  I got a message inviting me to come for a job interview in the Twin Cities next Friday.  I will need to make a 10 minute presentation on something that I might be teaching in this position.  There are so many things that I could talk on for 10 minutes, so I have been thinking about and exploring possibilites.  I conducted an informal survey and found that only about 3% of the teachers I work with know about and use Delicious, Skype, or RSS.

My first thought was to do something with ELM, but that seems too expected, so I have decided to look at something int he Library 2.0 category.  I emailed a few professional friends asking "what have you heard of lately or do you wish you knew more about?"  Of the three friends I wrote, all mentioned Blogs and RSS.  

One thing that I am particularly interested in right now is mobile podcasting.  Gabcast is a versatile application that allows a person to create a podcast from any phone, then, and this is really cool, it posts you podcast into your blog!

The other thing I'm working on is lesson plans for my Social Studies classes.  After all I am still teaching!  World Geography is in the Middle East, and US History is beginning the Industrial Revolution.