Now that I have a new job, I’m commuting for the first time in 10 years. My Kindle is keeping me company in the car and reading me The New York Times.

For the past few years, I’d been forced to listen to sports radio while driving. That’s because my car stereo was broken, attached manually with Scotch tape, and capable of playing just one station. Thanks, Mom, for the new one!

Having my Kindle read to me in the morning — using its text-to-speech function and Calibre’s “fetch news” feature — is a great way to spend my 30 minutes in the car.

Sure, the computerized voice takes some time to get used to, but now I find it smooth and reassuring. And yes, I could get through news faster if I read it myself silently — which I used to do, illegally, while driving — but that’s a safety hazard, plus it makes my fellow commuters quite angry and honk a lot.

Here’s a scintillating, 14-second audio snippet of yesterday’s session!

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Advanced Tip: The Kindle Keyboard, I’ve found, is the best Kindle for in-car text-to-speech. Somehow its speakers are louder and more conducive to the car’s auxiliary jack.

Let me know if you’d like more details about how to set this up. (My friends think I’m crazy, by the way, but that’s not especially new.) 

 I have six Kindles in my classroom (thank you, donors!), and my students love them. They read much more now, and they take care of the devices.

Managing my Kindle library, however, is not easy.

There are two things that make things difficult:

1. I get books from a variety of sources: Amazon, Project Gutenberg, the public library, and more.

2. It’s not easy to organize your books (especially into collections) from Amazon’s Manage Your Kindle page.

My goals this year are to expand my Kindle e-book collection (from 75 current titles) and to get better at managing it without too much stress.

To do so, I’m using Calibre to house my collection and Kindle Collection Manager to organize my books.

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

1. I’ve aggregated all my books into my Calibre library.

2. I’ve made a “master Kindle” with Kindle Collection Manager, which places all the books into the right collections.

From now on, this is what I will do:

1. When I get a new book, I will immediately move it to my Calibre library.

2. Then, I’ll share it with the six student Kindles over email. Note: This sometimes doesn’t work, but I don’t want to collect Kindles from students every time I get a new book. I’ll have to think about this more.

This process will ensure that all student Kindles have all the books, but it won’t automatically organize the new books into the right collections. There is no instant way that I know of to do this, so unless I figure out something, I’ll need to periodically sync up the Kindles.

I must say, this is a bit annoying to me. I wish things were easier. Of course, I’m really appreciative that I have these Kindles in the first place!

Do you have ideas about how to make this process easier? Please let me know! 

 I’m a big reader of the news and a big believer of teaching current events.

Despite what some adults say, students really like reading about what’s going on in the world.

Last year, I had my ninth graders read an Article of the Week. According to course evaluations, the AoW was the second most popular activity — after The 1,000,000 Word Challenge.

But the AoW was the only news my students read in class. Independent reading focused exclusively on fiction. In other words, my students didn’t have the opportunity to choose news for themselves. And that’s crucial.

As Kelly Gallagher argues, students need more exposure to the news so they can participate more actively in their communities. Though Gallagher and other teachers inundate their students with newspapers and magazines, I’ve not been able to find a workable solution.

The news in print is expensive. Time quoted me 59 cents a copy, which comes to about $600 for a class set per year. The New York Times Upfront is more affordable but comes out only once a month.

The best scenario would involve buying several newspapers and magazines so there would be a good variety. But this idea would be even more expensive.

With the tough economy, I haven’t been able to find a news organization willing to donate free copies of their product to my classroom. “We used to do that” was the reply from several representatives.

I suppose I shouldn’t be annoyed about raising funds to purchase periodicals. After all, much of my time last year involved building my classroom library through DonorsChoose. Something feels weird, though, about asking for big money for newspapers and magazines, which quickly get tossed in the recycling. I care about the news, but a book has a much longer shelf life. My dream is to find a news junkie willing to donate $1,000 a year so I won’t have to worry. (All teachers should have personal perpetual donors.)

Another option is to go electronic. Students could follow several news sources on their Google Reader or follow current events in some other techy way. Problem is, our school is far away from a 1:1 environment, which I find crucial for the kind of voluminous reading I’m suggesting. (My dream is that every student has a Kindle, and we use Calibre to fetch the news and send it, free, to their e-reader every morning.)

With school coming up soon, I’m a little lost about how to figure this out. Maybe this year my focus should be on access, to make sure my classroom has at least one copy of every major (serious) periodical. Classrooms should be places of ideas, and just as books should abound, so should the news.