The RSS feed that I chose to
explore was through the Feedly tool. I subscribed to a number of different
feeds so that I could read up on more events and issues going on in education
with a wide range of variety. A few that I enjoyed the most were Free
Technology for Teachers, Cool Cat Teacher Blog, Edudemic, TED Education, and
Edutopia RSS. I really like the TED Education feed of videos. These are fun
little videos that are interesting for students and can take a topic like bad
breath and make it somewhat fun to learn about. I also really liked Edudemic
because it had a number of articles that were on a variety of subjects. It
didn’t just focus on teaching or just the students, but it also had articles on
tips and tricks in the classroom and news in education. One article that I
really liked was about teachers allying with parents. It definitely is true
that as a teacher I will be dealing with students and their parents, so it is
smart to communicate effectively with parents.
I really liked some of the articles and podcasts I found on Cool Cat
Teacher Blog because they were very insightful and got you thinking. One
article was about the need to teach according to the time, and to provide
students with the technology and creativity to learn and not be controlled by
the fear of failure. I thought Feedly was a great tool. It organized all my RSS
feeds on one page and I could see how many articles had been posted by
scrolling through my home page. I found many of the feeds by searching
education, or by clicking on suggested feeds. It was easy and straight forward to
use. I will probably use this tool while I teach to keep updated on news and to
keep my classroom and lessons relevant for the students.
You can
find me on Twitter at @kendylleann6. I followed a total of 18 people/groups. I followed We Are Teachers for inspiration
and ideas for becoming a teacher. I followed a first grade teacher named Kathy
Cassidy because I wanted to see the way a teacher was using Twitter along with
her elementary classroom. I also followed Education Week to stay updated on
things that were going on in the news that were centered around education. I
learned that not very many children have access to preschool and that many
teachers aren’t giving students that test their knowledge appropriately. I followed discussion hashtags #education,
#edtech, #teaching, and #teachers. From these I was able to read many
interesting articles and to get new perspectives on teaching and educational
issues that I would never have thought of on my own. Although I like following
some teachers and groups on Twitter, I do not see myself really using Twitter
in my classroom. I enjoyed seeing posts of other teachers’ projects on here
though.
I requested
to explore both Ning groups, but I was admitted to Classroom 2.0 much faster
than The Educator’s PLN so I started exploring that one. Classroom 2.0 is
basically an area where you can find many helpful resources on how to
incorporate technology into the classroom and have discussions with other
educators. One discussion forum that I followed was about the use of
interactive white boards in the classroom. Many teachers suggested to start out
small by having students write down their lunches, and then move to bigger
projects on the board. I really enjoyed using Ning because it opened me up to
many new ideas that I could see myself using in my class.
Overall, I
think I learned a lot of great things by using these different networks. I
found Feedly and Ning to be very helpful as a teacher, while not seeing how I
would use Twitter in my classroom. I think Ning has a lot of resources to
offer. Once you get over the amount of information shown on the homepage of
Classroom 2.0, there is a lot to look through and use in a classroom. I liked the organization of Feedly. I thought
it was very easy to use, not intimidating at all, and it was clear on how to
get from page to page and view articles and videos. I liked Twitter for viewing
other people’s projects that they had done in classrooms, but I thought it
would be hard to go back and find something that you thought was interesting
later on. Like many other social networks, you also have to scroll through a
lot of unwanted feed in Twitter.
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