Utilizing RSS to the Max

Sometimes in life, you do things you had no idea that you were doing them.  This has certainly been the case with me and RSS.  For many moons, I ignored the orange RSS button on pages for two reasons, I didn't really know what it was and I really didn't care.  Or, so I thought was the case.  Fact is, with my personal MyYahoo account, I had in fact been using this technology without really knowing it.  Frankly though, the MyYahoo account has been getting less and less "airtime" from me in the past few months.  I spend almost all my time getting fully indoctrinated into the Google ranks (when I am not using GoodSearch to raise money for my school).  With that, I figure now is as good a time as ever to dive headfirst in with Google Reader (pictured above) Initially, I can say to you that I love it.  I do see pitfalls though.  First off, I don't have a lot of time in the course of a day and when I go to sites or blogs that I love, I tend to want to stay there.  Whereas before, I had to take an extra step or two to get to these sites for my personal reading pleasure, now, it is all right there.  Ugh, not sure I absolutely love or loathe this fact.

As I am thinking about this further though, it excites me when it comes to my students and there classroom (of course there are issues, but I will have to figure those out, such as # of computers, over-digitalization of students, etc)  Up-to-date interactions with science on a daily or quasi-daily basis would be fantastic for my students.  I am able to pull from the Life Sciences, Physical Sciences  as well as just about any other kind of science I can think of very easily and thus allowing the students to parcel out what areas within those sciences interests them most.   Integrating this technology to the curriculum does sound a bit daunting, but I feel it can be done in a meaningful and powerful way.

I'm going to admit, initially, I didn't see much use in podcasts.  Most of my students along with myself are visual as well as auditory learners and podcasts seem like they could be a bit boring.  Then I listened to some 60-second science from the iTunes podcast center and they are interesting.  Short, sweet, interesting and to the point.  I could easily have my students listen to one of these a day and give them a short "quiz" over the material to be sure they are paying attention and then go about my day.  I love this.  As I was searching through the podcasts center though, again I said to myself; "uh oh, this could be real dangerous".  This is the type of thing that I can easily get caught up in, especially if on a topic that I am hyper interested in at the moment (i.e. NFL Free Agency).  My productivity could be crushed in a matter of a few podcasts.  But, if I am able to harness my self-control, these are amazing vehicles for my own personal professional development.  There is so much out there that I have just a scintilla of knowledge about that I could learn on my own time.  Extrapolating further though, I do have substantial expertise in areas in which I could create a podcast that could prove to be useful to someone else out there in the big bad world.

My first thought to Flickr was, "This should be easy to find stuff for my science classes" (example above)  As I continued to play around in Flickr, I was trying to think of ways to use this for my math classes.  I want to push my students beyond their comfort zones and relaying visual interpretations of material covered may be interesting, stressful (on me and my students), and ultimately rewarding.  I must play with this some more in my mind's eye before I take this leap.  While it could have huge payoffs, it could also cause me a trip to the mental ward at my local healthcare providing institution.  Any insight from you would be most helpful.

I'm not sure how I feel about Delicious just yet.  Having just tinkered with it for an hour or so, I'm not sure how I feel about the "features" of the site.  Do you really want people "all in your business" like this?  Hmm.  Need to explore more to see if this will be used by me.  My students?  Oh my, I am sure a large group of them would love this type of "sharing" among themselves.  It is remarkable how "unconcerned" they are about their privacy on any issue.  Is this a good thing?  Wait, that is a question for another day.