Week #4: Educational Feeds

I forgot to mention on my RSS blog that I also subscribed to the Philadelphia Inquirer Breaking News and front page feeds. This would be considered my local paper even though I live in NJ.

For Activity #8, I reviewed both the search engines and educational feeds. I was disappointed to find that the link to Feedster was not working either time that I tried it. I had great success with the Technorati site which was easy to use. Although I should not have been surprised, I tried searching to see if I could find my own 2 blogs, the one I opened for another class and use for school when we begin research papers and the one I created recently for this class, but I had over 4,000 hits for blogs on citations! It is truly amazing how many people are using the net! This week at the school where I work, in addition to our Twitter, we now have a ning and believe it or not, we have homework for school on it also! It's all a little overwhelming even if it is fun and educational.

I also checked out the school library 2.0 blogs and was impressed that I could automatically subscribe to those already I wasn't in Google Reader at the time. I subsequently subscribed to classroom learning 2.0 as well.

As far as using RSS feeds, I think I will be using them to notify me of updates to issues important to me, like book talks on subjects, certain genres, using technology in the classroom, etc.
The library could set up RSS feeds by subject in order to help teachers keep abreast of current trends and techniques. I guess this should have been on my RSS post.

I can't comment on Feedster because I couldn't get it to open, but I thought that Technorati was pretty easy to use. I still had trouble refining my search terms though to get exactly what I was looking for. Actually, I even thought the tool right on the Google Reader site was easy also; once I got the hang of it.
One problem I experienced in Google was when I search for "Web English Teacher" thinking I would come up to the website, I actually came up to related blogs, twitters, etc. I clicked on one thinking it would be useful but it was about purchasing different types of literature and not what I expected at all. Since I had already hit the subscribe button - after this I was more saavy - it took me a few seconds to figure out how to unsubscribe! Eventually, though, even that was easy.
I was even able to set up folder for "teaching English", News Items, Library items - I put the Unshelved in here - I enjoy the cartoons, and one for our classroom blogs I am following.
These are the only tools I've used so far, but now that I know what the RSS symbol looks like, I'll be adding others on a regular basis.