RSS- 4

Over the past few weeks I have checked my igoogle and reader almost daily and have really enjoyed reading up on what others have been doing and learning new things from the other blogs I've followed. I found a few podcasts too and listened to a few "episodes" of those. I really like the convenience of being able to download them to an mp3 player so that I can listen to them when I have the time.

Looking back over my discovery and time using igoogle and reader, I can see many uses of them for life. RSS can make life so much easier for everyone if people just give it a chance and start using it. For it to be effective, you need to check it on a regular basis. I really like igoogle because it offers me so much information all in one place. Without it, I would have to go out to each individual website to find the things that I need.

Reader has helped make life easier too because I can see when my classmates and others I follow update their blogs rather than going out to the site and seeing no change. Visiting just two different sites, I can get everything I need.

As far as my future career, I can see myself using both of these quite a bit. In my classroom, I could have the students do some blogging and then subscribe to their blogs so that I could grade them all in one place. I could also get the parents set up with an aggregator and help them to subscribe to a class blog where I could post assignments and other things. That way, the parents will have the ability to see when I update rather then checking it all the time and seeing no changes.

We could also set up a class igoogle page so that every morning when we come in we can see all the daily information that we want or need. This could make calendar time, weather, and any other daily activities much quicker and easier. We could also have a daily thought or a daily vocabulary word that the students could write down each day. I see endless possibilities for using igoogle in the classroom because so many teachers have an overhead up when the students come in in the morning that they wash off and change each day. How great would it be if the students could design themselves what they want on this daily page so they will feel more in control of their learning.

I really enjoyed this process and plan to continue using both igoogle and reader in the future.