RSS Page Reflection

This is a lot of work.  I am hardly able to keep up with email from three accounts and this is like adding yet another.  As I mentioned in the workflow entry I have a difficult time building new habits and this is no exception.  Right now this is especially true as I readjust to having a baby in the house again as well as being a student again.  The time that I have invested in it has been surprisingly useful.

It took me a little while to get the hang of the Google Reader interface which surprised me because I generally pick up things like this quickly.  Other than that my experience has been pretty solid.  I haven't spent a lot of time searching for new feeds to add to subscriptions, instead I've focused on the feeds I picked for the RSS lab.  In general there are a lot of items that I skip over after reading only the title.  I was quickly enticed into a series of articles about interactive white boards (IWB).  I found it particularly interesting because I have an IWB and don't think that it has been any great benefit to my teaching, the articles cite many of the same reasons I am disillusioned by them.  It would have been good to have read articles such as the ones I shared prior to our decision to install them in every math classroom in the school. 

As a consumer I research many of the things that I buy ad nauseam and it was interesting to consider the fact that as a teacher adopting technology I simply just grab anything new that I can get my hands on with little to know time spent researching it.  It should be equally important to a teacher to research the potential of and possibly the limitations of anything we bring into our classrooms.  I have known for a while that I needed to be more thoughtful when it comes to using technology in my classroom which is one of the reasons I applied to the MAET program.  Its not as though reading the articles from the feed was amazingly insightful, what I gained more of was an appreciation that there are people with first hand experience that have thought about the same questions I have and put their thinking out there for the rest of us to consider and use. 

There doesn't seem to seem to be as much information in my feeds pertaining to actually teaching my content with technology as the prescribed feeds were general in their scope.  That tells me I probably need to find some other feeds that are more in line with my goals,content area and grade level.  That task proved difficult when I started looking for feeds to complete the lab assignment.  Having added the feeds I did and tracking them over a couple of weeks has helped me to know more about what I am actually looking for when I continue to add subscriptions.