Thing 9 - RSS Search tools

Which method of finding feeds did you find easiest to use?

• I love the EduBlog awards as a jumping-off place. I've found several good feeds that I am now subscribing to from those awards.
• I find most of my feeds as links from feeds I already subscribe to
  

Which Search tool was the easiest for you?

• Feedster was down when I went there so it was pretty easy to use (ha)
• Discovery Education is a great, easy-to-use resource
  

Which was more confusing?

• Bloglines returned so many options that I could have gotten lost for hours with only one search. I need to learn how to be more specific, I think, if that is going to be a useful tool for me.
• Technorati is also great for finding lots of info. I know a lot of folks use the Technorati rankings to determine how they are doing in the blog world
  

What kind of useful feeds did you find in your travels? Or what kind of unusual ones did you find?

• I found a couple of feeds with book recommendations. I can see that Amazon.com giftcard going to use very quickly
  

What other tools or ways did you find to locate newsfeeds?

• I like the NYTimes, Slate, and the Chronicle feeds
• My husband and I regularly send interesting feeds/posts to each other or post them for each other on del.icio.us
  

RSS readers - how to stay on top of everything

I am a huge fan of RSS readers. I've been using RSS Bandit for a couple of years and still like it a lot. I'm thinking about switching to Google reader so I can access it from school. That may or may not be a good idea. During baseball season, I might forget about the students and just keep up with the Astros.

I subscribe to feeds from the Chronicle and the NYTimes as well as Slate magazine. I also subscribe to a couple of great ed tech blogs - Borderland, Cool Cat Teacher blog, and weblogg-ed.
I read a lot of blogs about the emerging church, I subscribe to the This Old House blog about their current project, and some parenting blogs. My current new favorite blog is Unclutterer.

Thing #7 - Google rocks!!

Google is becoming a more important tool in my life. My family has a home page that we use to coordinate our calendars, grocery and project lists, and provide quick access to our Flickr photos and the lovely Houston weather forecast. I also use that site to read my home email from school, if I'm expecting something important.

Educational uses? Hmmm. I haven't set up my teacher webpage yet because I am trying to reconcile use of the classroom portal with my own webpage. That is one of my goals for the new year - to figure out how to use the district's tools as well as other tools to make sure the students have access to the info they need to be successful. I don't have my mind around all of that at the moment so I haven't used anything besides our school portal. Many changes to come, however.

Thing #6 - Mashups and add-ons, oh my

Wow. I knew that lots of folks were using Flickr's open source API to generate new applications but I had no idea there were so many cool tools available.

I'd love to make trading cards of all the teachers and students at our school. Somehow, we could use them as prizes or to generate teamwork. "The first class to find Mrs. So-and-So this week and bring her to the office wins a prize." Or the first group to build a set of all of the 7th graders wins something. (Middle schoolers love to win food).

The mosaics seem like fun too. I'm a scrapbooker and am always looking for new ideas. I'm trying to get into digital scrapbooking but am finding it hard to decide to take the time to learn it.

fd's Flickr toys seems like a great site. I've posted that link to my del.icio.us.

I could use some new motivational posters in my class. I've got a few ideas and may try one to see how it turns out. I'm thinking about "T-H-I-N-K before you speak".

Mosaic maker, jigsaw, Warholizer, and billboard are also inspiring a bunch of ideas. Lots to ponder from this Thing.

Thing #5 - Flickr

I love Flickr. Our family Flickr site is here. We post every picture we take to Flickr.

Tags are a wonderful thing. They make it so easy to find pictures from previous years or related to a certain topic. It's been helpful to find pics of my kids to make an 'all about me' collage for school. I'm not currently a member of any groups but have used groups to find images. Maybe there is a science teacher's group??? I'll go and look.

Thing #4 - Register

I'm registered. Hello to all my Cornerstone friends out there in the www.

Thing #3 - Not my first blog

Setting up and posting to this blog using Blogger is easy!!! I've never created an avatar before so that was pretty fun. A little overwhelming b/c there are so many options. And I thought picking out my clothes for school was difficult. We are big into the farmer's market at t'afia restaurant these days so I chose that as my first background.

I currently have a couple of blogs. One is my personal blog (sporadic posting), one is for the SBISD 8th grade science teachers (lots of good ideas, not much posting), and one is my family's Christmas present tracking blog which is currently getting a lot of use.

I read a lot of blogs everyday. In fact, there are a few I want to catch up on before I go to sleep. 'night.