Let THEM Come to YOU!

As the parent of three rather busy and precocious elementary school students, I am always in the market for something that is efficient.  Enter the world of RSS.  It reminds me of Peapod, the service Stop & Shop uses to get groceries to busy families so they don't have to brave the lines.

It really is very simple (actually, Really Simple Syndication), and most important, a massive time-saver.  One thing, however:  you have to decide how you want to set up, otherwise you will get too much info, which is what RSS is designed to avoid.  I remember a Chinese restaurant in Washington DC (where I went for undergrad) whose menu was 20 pages long.  It was very hard to make a decision!  RSS can be like this if you aren't careful, so learn how to make it work.

Perhaps equally important, the RSS function can help you as a blogger.  Most who blog want to be read, and there are tricks to help it happen.

Once I started, I was hooked.  How about you?

Big Bounty of Beautiful Blogs!!

The more I think about classroom blogging, the more I like what I think!  What a wonderful opportunity for our classrooms to reach out beyond old, static borders and participate in the global community.  Reviewing an article by our esteemed Judy Arzt, Online Collaborative Inquiry: Classroom Blogging Ventures and Multiple Literacies, I see now, more clearly than ever before, that using technology to link classrooms into a global collaborative is the wave of the future, and this will be what helps our society and workforce move forward into the 21st century.

Technological advances have always dictated the direction taken by societies that adopt them, from the development of the wheel to the advent of the computer age.  Our task, as educators, is to see beyond the here and now and become more like visionaries, who help our students adapt to the changing nature of our society and economy.  Fifteen years ago, I worked in an international company that, although a fully formed technology operation with sophisticated computerized equipment, still had no presence on the Web.  Many of us could see that international transactions were going to move almost entirely to the Internet in the years to come, and we were quickly proven correct in our assessment.

Fast forward to the present, and in several communities where I have observed classroom activity, the resistance to a web presence is shocking.  I have met several bright, intrepid teachers who have helped create a technology movement within their schools, but many more are alarmed at the shift to an electronic world.  Admittedly, this new world is daunting:  so many options from which to choose, so many rabbit holes in which to potentially disappear.

Enter the wonderful world of Judy Arzt!  In her article, she not only gives wonderful examples of classrooms that have moved into a constructivist, collaborative, multi-modal atmosphere of learning, she gives an astounding number of links to websites that can help the reticent teacher develop a web presence for their classroom (and perhaps for themselves).

I am charged up!  I am invigorated!  What do you think?