Thing 2 blogging and Rss feeds

In year two of this MILI journey I finally have my RSS reader up and running. I still only use it for MILI and one other feed but look forward to adding to it now that I am more comfortable using it. I guess I'm one who is better at trying this tech stuff in baby steps, a little here and a little there. I even had big plans of having my 6th graders blog once a week this year so they would have a running record of the year. I am now comfortble using blogger and thought it would be fun to have the students set up accounts...oh the drama...not all students have e-mail accounts and as a district we can't be responsible for setting up e-mails here at school...so...we were invited to use moodle as a mode for our blogs. It is a good system with opportunities to have forums where students can work together and respond to questions that I post and they can comment on what others have written. I sometimes feel like we learn about all of these great tools that we can use and then the district dictates which tools fit within the "laws" of school use...it can be very frusterating. My blogs are not what I had envisioned, however, I learned about a new tool that I can use with my students. The glass half full or half empty, I guess it's all in how you look at it.

When going deeper and looking at the videos they had on youtube (I made it around that nasty filter, yippee) I think there were a couple that would work well to show students about why blogging is something they will want to get proficient at. I liked the term hyper reading in reference to starting in one place and hyperlinking to new and better information. This is something I do all the time as a means of finding exactly the information that I am looking for bt never thought about it in terms of an actual research process. I think this is something that should be addressed with students as many of them do this already but they are not careful about noting the specific site that the information they took came from. I could see this being a problem when they go to cite their sources.

Changing times

Welocme to the information age where we are creating a culture of information junkies. I do not say this in a bad way, it can just be overwhelming at times. I was talking with some of my volleyball friends about how different our tv watching habits are today vs. the 1980's. This came about as we were watching a replay of an 80's Packers/Bears game. Can you believe that you had to wait forever for the score to pop up and the announcers had to tell you what down it was and how many yards were needed for a first down, and forget about the scores of the other games...Now you can see everything you need to know right up on the screen all at once and you wouldn't even need to have the sound on. If you're a junkie like me you're also watching on the couch with your laptop tuned into nfl.com so you can see all the other scores and highlights as they are happening...almost. Can you remember back to the days when there was no infomation tag sliding across the bottom of your screen giving you all the days news highlights while the anchor man is talking about other things. It was interesting to reflect on the way this one "normal" aspect of most people's day has changed over time.