RSS Saved My Relationship with Dave Barry

I'll admit it, I love Dave Barry. I don't know of many other newspaper columns that come close to the witty humor that is so flawlessly delivered by Dave. I was in a state of mourning when his column was unceremoniously snatched from my local paper. My Instructional Technology classes came to my rescue again!!

I learned about RSS feeds this week. Since I'm too lazy to keep up with Dave Barry each week on his website, I can follow his writing through bloglines.com. This is a site that allows a user to bookmark many sites and have the newest material from those sites listed in one spot. I'm really excited to keep up on blogs, recipe sites, and Language Arts content sites.

Technorati and Del.icio.us

Technorati and Del.icio.us are tools that guide me through the opinions of other people.

Technorati is a site that allows the user to search blogs. A blog is really just someone's opinion and so Technorati helps me find what other people think about a specific subject. This is great for social purposes, but I'm still trying to find the application to academic pursuits. Why would I want my students to search blogs for information when they could search reputable sources?

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site that allows me to look up information according to tags that people have "tagged" information with. As I looked up information, I found many interesting items, I'm just not sure that these items are worth precious classroom time.

So, this week I was pretty unimpressed with my ability to use my imagination and see how these sites could be useful in my classroom or a library. I'm hoping that my classmates can help me think of useful ideas.

Rollyo

Rollyo is a tool for teachers. This allows me to customize a search engine to include specific sites to be searched. Today is cold, so I customized a search engine that would only search travel sites. When I did a search, I quickly found some amazing pictures of Cancun.

This will actually be very helpful to me when I start a research unit with my students. We do a research unit that involves traveling and I can narrow the searches to the sites I want the students to scour. On second thought, I may just link students to our classroom blog and post web sites of interest there. Technology gives me so many options.

Thanks again Inst Tech!!!

Big Huge Labs

Here is just another example of what you can do with that wacky tool we call the Internet. This helps me remember Reuben's trip to the fire station this summer. He did cry when he saw a man with a mullet, but I believe he came away a stronger boy.




You can click on the image to get a clear view.

Skype

Tonight was a great night. Reuben and my mom were able to talk face to face using Skype. I'm so thankful for this great service that allows my son to communicate with my mother. If not for this type of technology, my mother may never get the full explanation of Thomas the Train's buffers and steampipe. I'm really excited to keep in touch with all kinds of people this way.