RSS activity

1.) I am following mostly teacher related feeds, such as...
NCTE.org (which is the national council of teachers of English, which I didn't know existed, bonus!), atozteacherstuff.com, and teachersbreakroom.com. But, I also threw in a few guilty pleasures like TMZ, The Alligator Online, and poorbuthappy.com, which is a website for travelers and backpackers.

2.) I chose those sites because I thought they would be helpful to have, and while I'm sure the NCTE.org web site will be more meaningful to me once I actually am a teacher, at this stage, it did nothing special for me. And the others were chosen because of a personal preference. Mostly though, I followed other English teacher's blogs. I found that most of the official teaching web sites weren't feeds, and didn't provide me with much help as far as getting a job teaching, what the job is really like, and day to day impressions of being a teacher. The blogs of different English teachers really intrigued and fascinated me. Here was true insight. I followed one guy, Jimbo, who is teaching in Japan, which is something I may want to do someday, as I teach at the ELI. I felt that I learned a lot about being a teacher through these blogs.

3.) I think the challenging part for me was sifting through junk links to find a truly great web page or feed. A lot of the teacher's blogs I clicked on didn't really discuss their teaching at all, just their personal lives. And I did a lot of reading to sift through the meaningless stuff to find something that would be of use to me. Also, as a person who is easily distracted online, I found the Google reader to be overstimulation for me. It was all right there at my fingertips, and my fingertips really just wanted to look at what the latest celebrity gossip was, even though I knew I should be reading the teaching web sites. It was my own fault for putting it on there though :).

4.) I thought about this in the context of a teacher like you, who has most of the class material online. In this case, it would be really easy for students to access all the material from one place. Students could create a google reader and add all the web sites needed from your class. But as a teacher, it would be useful in keeping track of students' blogs, even if they are not required. I'm taking another education class, and it talks a lot about informal formative assessment, where mere observation of a student outside classroom settings, either before, after, or in this case, online, can be one of the most helpful ways to gain insight into a student's behavior and performance. But anyway, another way that a teacher could use it as a way to keep up with current events, such as in many social studies classes. It could be used to formulate a project, or for students to use to have everything they need for a research paper. There are many options.

5. I don't really want to know more about feed readers, but what implications they might have on our society. It's so mindboggling that in only 21 short years, the Internet has become an instant gratifier of sorts. We went from dialup, to DSL, to iPhones, to feed readers that actually cut down time we have to spend (a few milliseconds per loading probably) surfing between websites. That's a pretty magnificent achievement. But where does it go from here? Everyone has these crazy notions of the future and what kind of technology will be there, but are they really that crazy? Most of all, for me, I wonder what teaching will be like in the distant future. Will teachers be obsolete? I don't think so, but I think those teachers will have a hell of a challenge.