Task Four - Getting Started with RSS

This was a pretty quick jump for me. Anna Watkins showed me a few things about RSS last year, and it looked nifty, but I never got started with it myself, as I have to form a habit and then I stick with it. I am finding it easier to think about it now, and having all of my frequent sites fed to a single site makes loads of sense. Now I just have to go through my mountain of bookmarks and see which ones I think I visit frequently. I've already shifted my main news sites for China to Google Reader and have been following them for the last week.

I can't find the "subscribe to this blog's feed" button at the bottom of the Tech & Learning blog site, and I don't want to subscribe to the whooooooooole site, as warned by the Pi 2.0 Masters. I did copy and paste a link within their blog page that seems to do the trick.

I checked out blogs from Tech & Learning, iLearn, and Infinite Thinking.

Tech & Learning

I found the article 100 Web Tools to Enhance Collaboration (Part 2) by Ozge Karaoglu. It led me to lots of other possibilities, which is one of the most helpful sorts of things I find on the net. Survs, a site for creating online surveys had promise. We could use it for all sorts of uses for it, though such surveys can also be done more casually or in the classroom with ActivVote, which I ought to try too. Still, it might be fun to use it as part of a collaboration with another school, say in China, if I ever manage to set up such a thing. Wikispaces, I've used, last summer in place of a blog. I found it as easy as this blogger and would like to use it again in the future. The issue with wikis, the couple of times I've used them, was how to motivate others, students, to contribute. Yuuguu seemed like Skype with more possibilities for sharing information. That seemed cool, but do I need it right now? There are so many methods and approaches out there, it's hard to find a standard in the emerging ideas. We might do something within our class but not be able to share it easily or duplicate it with another group, for they may well use something else.

Infinite Thinking Machine

This site had little for me. It consisted mostly of ads for prestigious speakers, not so useful for now. Some of them are surely interesting, but I have my issues with lots of listening, and much of it was business-oriented.

iLearn Technology

This led me to a couple of practical sites and one article I liked. Number Gossip is a cool database of information, mostly mathematical, about individual numbers. Stixy was pretty cool. It creates a virtual bulletin board, where we can place things all kinds of things - pictures, memos, images - together, but what would be okay for the kids to share? I know we'd get excited and then realize that we were inadvertently planning to or already had placed any number of things we shouldn't. I liked the article "Why Drill and Skill are Necessary in Education," for some of this seems to be lost in the shuffle of the latest whiz-bang technique or widget.

I like having the New York Times at my fingertips, and I've already enjoyed my links with NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday. Scott Simon is the best in the business. Now off to more RSS discoveries!