Public domain audiobooks! Who knew?

In a meeting of Project Elite held last week in Second Life, our guide Elaine Tulip provided us a tour of the Professional Library in Second Life. There was a section where public domain audiobooks of public domain titles were available for listening. This brought to my attention the fact that public domain audiobooks exist. After the meeting I browsed for sites offering free books and discovered, “Libri Vox: acoustical liberation of books in the public domain…  LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books.” Listeners can easily download public domain audiobooks in many languages for use on various types of players. Volunteer readers create recordings of chapters to add the collection of available titles. This is an exciting discovery for me. Now, in addition to audiobooks which I purchase, I can add public domain podcasts and public domain audiobooks to my digital audio collection for use with iPod shuffles at my school. I am still in the first few weeks of student and teacher use of the iPod shuffles, and so far the feedback has been very positive.

In my RSS feed this week I saw an interesting video posted on Bobbi Newman’s “Librarian by Day” blog. Here is a link to the video on YouTube entitled, “Social Media Revolution 2.” Great food for thought. Exciting. And a little scary, too.

I rolled out new projects with 8th graders (using Glogster.com and Voicethread.com) and 7th graders (using Wikispaces.com). In almost every class it took me the entire period to explain the nature of the projects and to demonstrate the use of the tools. Unfortunately the students did not have time to begin their own work. On the plus side they will be provided time and support for these projects both during their weekly library periods and their weekly technology class periods. Furthermore, the students were much more attentive than usual during the demonstrations, which is very encouraging. They are eager to use these tools!

I hope to have good progress to report by the end of this week as well as some finished student information products to share.

Fran Feeley’s Blog by Francis A. Feeley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.