When I first read over this
exercise, I thought that it would be simple, quick, and easy. Boy, was I wrong. I did not realize how difficult it would be
to find feeds that interested me. Wait,
I can’t say that completely. It was easy
to find common and widely recognized professional feeds like, CNN, National
Geographic, and National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). It was much more difficult to find smaller
niche feeds that I could find useful.
The two search tools, Topix and Technorati, were a little too confusing
for me. There was so much to read on
each of the homepages, I didn’t know where to start. Feeling frustrated, I switched to Google Blog
Search. I fared much better here. The page was simple and easy to read, which
was perfectly fine for my level. I was
able to locate the more popular feeds pretty quickly (the ones above), and even
found some smaller ones that are related to meeting teachers direct needs
(lesson plans, classroom management, etc.)
After
locating some that would help me as a teacher, I tried to find some that I
could use personally. This was also more
difficult because there are just so many blogs out there in the blogosphere. For example, when I typed in the word ‘parenting’,
a zillion options popped up. Not only
that, but then the majority of the names sounded strange or questionable. Then my mind jumped to suspicious thoughts …
“What if I click on it and I get some sort of malware (which I did when I tried
the Mashup activity)? What if I click on
it and questionable material comes up on the screen and now I will be flagged
by the Powers-That-Be who control the Internet and they report me to the
authorities?” Oh, the thoughts were
endless. It took a while to read through
many of the topic blurbs, but I was finally able to find a few that were
legitimate. I recognized the names from some
magazines, so I knew I would be save. Is
there a way to find out which ones are real and which ones are either hoaxes/virus
senders? I still have some much to
learn.
No comments:
Post a Comment