EduKindle

I admit it, I cried like a baby. But I wiped away the tears and got the transcript to share with you, formatted for the Kindle. As simple as the process is, it still took over an hour to get it done. If you are like me, you heard a bunch of stuff in the flow of the speech that you would like to refer back to; this transcript should help.

You can get the file here, save it to your desktop, and then connect the Kindle to your computer with the USB cord. Just drag the Inaugural Address file into the “documents” file that will appear in the window opened for the Kindle. Pull the USB cord, check the Menu, and you are good to go! 

Right after I posted Calendar for Kindle as a free download a few weeks ago, I got a bunch of feedback about how folks would really like it to work. Calendar was intended as a quick reference, but many of you are like me and find it helpful to be able to keep notes and reminders on the Kindle using the keypad (one of the BIG advantages that the Kindle has over other ereaders). In fact, I have found myself using Notepad more and more, sitting at Starbucks or at my daughter’s indoor lacrosse practice, not fumbling for a pen and the back of a store receipt to take a note on. I really like being able to view all my notes at once by selecting “My Notes and Marks” while I have Notepad open.

So, long story short, based on your feedback, I created Planner 2009 for Kindle and you can get it on the Downloads page (see tab above). Here you can keep your date reminders in an orderly way, but still navigate around the year pretty quickly with the linked months on the start page and the “back button.” (I was glad to hear Leslie Nicoll mention this underused navigation resource her Kindle Chronicles interview a week or so ago!) I also included a “Year at a Glance” page and some instructions for use.

Go ahead and grab the Planner for free and let me know what you think!

Happy New Year to all Kindlers! I have been checking out some of the best edu-bloggers over the holidays and want to make a few recommendations for the new year. These should be exciting times in education with a new administration in Washington and tough economic times around the country. Maybe the time is right for the inherent economies of the Kindle to catch on…;-) (Seriously, there will be many, many more Kindles at work in schools by the end of 2009 than there are today–you heard it here first!)

So, as an educator, what blogs should you fire up on the Kindle? First, I am going to recommend a blog that you can access through the Kindle Store, meaning that each time a post is made you will have it formatted and sent wirelessly to your Kindle to read at your leisure. The blog is called “Think Again,” and it appears in the New York Times blogs every Sunday. The author is Stanley Fish, a fellow whom I came to read as an undergraduate when I studied Milton. The book is named Surprised by Sin, and you can tell from the title that Fish is a bit of an iconoclast. He’s a good writer, too.

His posts range from dealing with customer service at ATT to a new “prose” translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost (done on the premise that the poem is so dense that readers need a translation from the poem’s original language–English).

But Fish’s primary target is the topic of academic freedom, and, in a series of posts last fall, he took up the issue of whether or not professors and other teachers should be allowed to wear campaign buttons to class, or display political bumper stickers on their cars. Does the title of Fish’s latest book–Save the World on Your Own Time–give you a hint as to Fish’s opinion?

This is Kindle blog-reading at its best.