I am spending my Friday night with a nice cup of hot apple cider grading and working on coursework. I am noticing that all but one of the blogs from 4th grade classrooms have not been updated to reflect upon today's school day. There were 128 new feeds when I entered my Google Reader last night compared to 56 tonight. The Tech and Learning feed had three new information links that I viewed today. All three of them brought me to the main page but I was able to explore from there my interested. I looked into "best practices" and "ideas and opinions." I felt that I kept getting directed to the same page which did not have articles that interested me. However, using the Google Reader saves time since I am able to see the title and quickly browse the articles and posts from blogs. I found it helpful since not only is a teacher's time valuable but most individual's time is limited.
I really enjoyed being able to connect to a professional learning community outside of my school. I was able to see what other teachers at not only my grade level but in all ends of teaching are doing in their classrooms and strives they have made in the digital community. I especially was interested in the feed from ISTE Connects- Educational Technology about the movie "Waiting for Superman." My Superintendent mentioned the movie on our district's opening day and I have not previously heard anything about the movie. Since it came up on the RSS page I was able to dig a lot deeper into what the movie was actually about and even watch a movie trailer.
From my exploration these past few days with the RSS reader I plan to share the use of it with teacher and parents at my school. I have a small handful of parents that consistently use the internet and we keep in close contact with sharing education sites. If we were able to inform each other using the Google Reader it would cut down on emails between individual families. I can also do the same with peers at my school. At a conference this morning, we were given many sites on autism. I could look for blogs and if I could follow these sites and then add them to a folder on my Google Reader. They then would either be able to be shared or if fellow teachers decided to also have a Google Reader we would be able to share items.
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