There is another negative to this program I would like to address. It attempts to set up a system in which the Superintendent of Schools has total control. The Board of Education is supposed to sit back and let the Superintendent do whatever he wants. In Kentucky, the law changed in 1990 to decentralize power in school districts. Giving total power to a superintendent opens a school district up to the possibility of unscrupulous manipulation of power for personal gain. I warn districts not to make themselves vulnerable to those who would take advantage. Keep the checks and balances in your system. Always remember to keep the children first and separate the wheat from the chaff in the Working on the Work program.

Our district is now run with the iron fist of a superintendent who reigns by intimidation and threat. Many have lost their job through “non-renewal” or “restructuring”. Our test scores have NOT gone up and the morale of the staff and many of the parents is at an all time low. Please do not let yourselves fall into this trap. Instead of a professional development program that is “same size fits all”, individualize training for staff the same way you are supposed to individualize instruction for children.

Thanks for the email. I did make a change to the iWeb page due to the fact that the RSS Feed was marked Midwinter and I thought I would be able to create several pages within the domain in iWeb which wasn’t the case. That’s why I changed the RSS Feed. I am making some uploads and will make sure all of the previous podcasts are up and running. I have all of the Midwinter Podcasts in mp3 format and will work on an html page where people can download them. If you need a specific one I can forward to you so you can distribute. Whatever I can do to help, I will be more than happy and thanks for letting me know about only 4 podcasts showing up. I only use iWeb for the podcasts that we put up and that’s after our big conferences. Thanks Wes..

albert.

Hmmm, apparently TASA has changed up their RSS feeds since I subscribed and downloaded several of these– the XML feed I used to subscribe is no longer available.

It looks like they have been using iWeb to make their RSS feeds and have publihsed more podcasts since this time, and now the feed is different.

I converted the m4a 128 kbps version of the Schlechty center podcast I had downloaded previously to an mp3 file and uploaded it as a mirror copy to my site for download, you should be able to grab this and put it in your podcatcher software program and on your mp3 player (unfortunately it is large at almost 50 MB, I did not have immediate luck for some reason using audacity to make a 32 kbps version).

TASA has an RSS feed you can use to subscribe to their podcasts. Unfortunately for some reason just the latest 4 are showing up in the feed, the link to their podcast archive shows them all.

For the other podcasts I’m subscribed to, you can use podnova and import my podnova OMPL file to get them all, they will load into iTunes or whatever podcatcher software program you are using.

I’ll email a question on this to Albert Rivas, who is the TASA webmaster and podcasting guru. I also hope they’ll use ID3 tags better, they didn’t with their early podcasts– I’m thrilled they are offering recordings like these, I do think it presents a need for mp3 audio-only versions in addition to the m4a enhanced ones. Unfortunately Garageband and iWeb don’t support a very easy way for content publishers to do this (yet) and the RSS feed system there can be confusing and tricky, esp if people (as apparently TASA has) make changes to an existing feed.

thanks,
Miguel