Week 4, Things 8 & 9

While I had heard of RSS, I had absolutely no idea what is was. I like the quote by Jen Wagner on her Thoughts from a Technospud blog, "RSS is like a TIVO for your computer." This really simplified it for me and put it in terms that make sense for me. I decided to use Google Reader. It's very easy to subscribe to feeds and now that I'm aware of them, I see the RSS symbol everywhere. The problem, of course, is that it's very easy for this to become unmanageable quickly. I've played around with different feeds for the last couple of days, adding and deleting as I'm trying to find what I think will benefit me.

I recently got back from the Model Schools conference in Washington D.C. One message that I heard repeated frequently, was that we as educators must embrace new technologies and move forward. One small example that made this point is that in schools (certainly true in my district) is that we are expending a lot of energy telling students to not let us see their cell phones or we will take them away. In reality, most students don't wear watches anymore; they tell time by looking at their phones. Also, instead of fighting the phones, encourage students to take a picture of the example you just put up on the board, etc.

We need to deal with the new realities. When I got back from this conference, it was time to upgrade my cell phone, so I chose a model (okay, most of them now have online capability) that enables me to read my email on my phone. I've had this feature for a week now and love it. Well, I also discovered that on Google Reader if you go to Goodies, it explains how to access your RSS feeds on your mobile phone. This is great! I can now check my email and my feeds anytime, anywhere. I can utilize small chunks of time instead of needing to commit a large block of time.