There is a method in my madness. The feed readers serve an important purpose in the course but I haven’t talked much about it yet.
At this point many of you have got to be thinking, “Why are we all over the map with these things?”
That’s easy. I need you to all try the various tools so you have a better depth of understanding for the tools and what they are before we get into more exotic notions. The best way is to use them.
But we’ve also got a logistical problem in that looking at everybody’s blog everyday to see if they’ve posted anything new could take a long time. That’s why we’re using the aggregators. Once we have everybody’s feeds loaded into the aggregators, we only need to check there in order to see if anybody has written anything new. It makes it easy to scan the whole landscape and focus on only those things of immediate interest, like my morning post or hot news from Steven Downes at OLDaily. The feed reader keeps track of what’s happened since the last time you looked and gives you control over how much new stuff you want to take on at any given point in time. It’s your ‘environtmental scanner’ and it returns those voices to which you want to listen.
In our class, that means being able to see everybody’s blogs and respond to the conversation relatively quickly without having to spend a lot of time going down a list of book marks by hand.
You can subscribe to a great many things by putting their feeds in your feed reader (”feeding the ‘gator”) — I have the local weather feed and the earthquake warning feed as the top two feeds in my ‘gator. I’m not really worried about the earthquakes but it’s amazing to see how many M5+ quakes there really are. In addition, I have over 400 feeds fo blogs and other resources that I keep track of daily. This tool lets me keep a finger in the hurricane of internet based information without having to spend all day scanning thru websites. If something happens in my field, then somebody in my network of aggregated feeds will write about it and i’ll learn of it… often before the press does. Good ‘gator skills let you build your “private edition” newspaper fresh every few minutes — or every day — and helps you manage the information flow.
Hang in there with it. I know it’s confusing, but it’ll get easier with practice. We’re working to develop your daily habit to include checking email and scanning the feeds. Any professional who is not plugged into the wider world these das is missing out on a vast flow of information. This is especially true for teachers and, even if you are not going to be teaching at a distance when the course is over, you can take away the skills of the distance learner to help you be better members of an increasingly complex profession.
August 22nd, 2007 at 8:24 am
[...] As part of today’s reading, please review Why a Feed Reader? and start cruising through your ‘gators for interesting things to post on. OLDaily is an enormous resource and Remote Access is going through his “pre-launch” classroom technology review. [...]
August 22nd, 2007 at 10:17 am
Wow. I never even thought about being able to put other things on the aggregator. I think I’m definitely going to look into the weather one since my husband always asks me what the weather is going to be like even though most of the time I’m not even awake and out of bed. I wish I knew about this sooner. I need more time savers in my life!
August 23rd, 2007 at 1:15 pm
I am currently using Bottom Feeder as my gator. Are there feeders that are better than others, or do most of them function the same way? I am clicking on whatever new post I want to read, and it opens in my Internet browser… Are the entries typically read within the program itself, or are they used to open browsers? I am already envisioning uses for K-12 uses…
August 23rd, 2007 at 3:12 pm
“Gators are different based on the kind of platform. BottomFeeder is a good one and I think you can set it to open IN the tool itself rather than popping a browser window. I use Liferea, but I’m a geek. Sage is a good feed reader plugin for FireFox and then “opening in the browser” is actually a good thing. Google Reader is another good one that’s web based. There are several good “local” or “desktop” based ones as well, depending on your platform.
August 24th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
I had never heard of a feeder before this class - I love this tool. It took a little bit to figure out the benefits of it when I was trying to find it but now since I have it, I can’t wait to tell everyone! What a wonderful idea to have crap brought to me instead of me finding crap! This is what would be referred to as “working smarter” not “working harder”!
August 25th, 2007 at 12:53 am
I think that I commented on the feed reader somewhere else, maybe on my blog, but I am really impressed with this little tool. I had no acquaintance with it before this class. I am using a Google reader that I access through gmail.
August 25th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
I really like the feed reader. It has made it quite easy to keep up with this class while I am working. I just have it open and at the bottom of my screen all day. When I get a chance I pull it up to see if there is anything new posted.
August 25th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
After trying to get oriented to all the technology involved with this class, I am starting to see how it all fits together and how useful it can be. This reminds me of basic training in the Army. In the first two weeks, you get blown away with all the military “stuff” that is completely foreign. Then, without even realizing it, you start thinking and acting like a soldier. The first two weeks is rough, though and while this is not physically challenging, the mental challenge is certainly great.
August 20th, 2008 at 7:35 am
[...] Why a Feed Reader for an [...]
August 22nd, 2008 at 7:29 pm
I found that there were many feeders to choose from when I googled gator. I chose a google reader because it seemed easy to use and I understood it better than some of the others I tried. I am still navigating and trying to figure some of the options. I would like to change the view of the site. I can see now after exploring how the reader combines everyone’s blog and makes it much easier to keep track of everyone’s posts. I am starting to feel a little more comfortable with all this new technology everytime I use it.
August 24th, 2008 at 12:54 am
Before this class I had never heard of a feed reader. It is a pretty neat thing though. It took me a while, but I think I have figured it out. I’m still not sure how to subscribe to other peoples sites. I can’t wait until I completely understand this.
August 24th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
Getting used to this part of the class has been the hardest for me. I had never used a feed reader and had never blogged. It is taking me a little while to get the hang of things, but I already find myself checking this as I do my e-mail. I am really starting to enjoy it!