Thing 6 - RSS Exploration/Implementation

The RSS reader is revolutionary, and I am a little surprised I have not stumbled across it in my technology experience. It is something I definitely look forward to utilizing. In my ventures using it today, I have found three specific blogs to follow.

The first one, A Difference, concerns the methods of teaching, and how we can incorporate technology in our planning. I joined this to gain insight in pedagogy, as I look for ways to improve my teaching.

The second blog I subscribed to is about teaching ESL, ELL, and EFL students. The author discusses what educators can do for these students, and how we can reach them by teaching them to set goals.

Then the third one I joined is called Moving at the speed of creativity, which I mainly employed because it looks like a blog that keeps up to date with what is occurring with technology. I watched a video about the laptops that are supposed to come out in 2012. They are trying to find a way to make these flat, touch screen laptops completely out of plastic to be very accessible for students, and they will only cost $75.

Then I also added a few more subscriptions, and one was TedTalks, which is completely made up of videos. I watched one of them from Marian Bantjes, and her talk was very inspiring. Her message reminded me of teaching. In her art, and design, she hopes to inspire ideas in others to help them pursue their own personal passions. We do this in teaching, we don’t know which students we will inspire, unless they return to share their own stories.

She also pointed out the visual stimulation is really important, and key to creation of our ideas, as she hopes her work inspires. I found this point interesting, and her designs highly relating to mathematics in this aspect. In math, a lot of concepts are understood better when they are visually represented. But the challenge is making the majority of it visual, as that is what students need.

RSS is a pretty neat invention, and I look forward to using it, and figuring out ways to use it in my classroom as well.