My early impressions of blogs are that they are an effective way to share information with individuals. I used a blog before with a class that I had taken through the Kent ISD called "23 Things." It also can be a nice way to get feed back from readers through their comments they post. It is nice to be able to ask the writers of information questions.
As far as my experiences with RSS Readers, I love them. This is a nice simple way to follow information that is updated without having to type in a thousand different websites or clicking on your favorite’s folder and selecting each site. You can simply read the headlines to see if it is what you want or not. If it interests you, then you can click to find out more. I have feeds to news, sports, free technology, and blogs that I follow. This really decreases the amount of time I could be wasting by going to all those websites individually. I'm sure we have gone to a website and found that on a particular day, there was nothing of value to us. That totally wastes your time. If you are like me, my day is to busy to waste time.
After reading Dale’s Cone, I find that Blogs and RSS best fit in the Visual symbol section of the cone. Blogs fit well here because they can give you that timeline of events. For instance, I had a friend that adopted two more children from Bogota, Columbia and they blogged daily about the adoption process. They were in Bogota for three months while paperwork was being done. It was great to be able to follow their daily happenings and see pictures. It made you feel as if you were going through the experience with them. Without this technology, we wouldn’t have known this information until they got back. The reason I feel RSS fits here is because of the way information is organized in a flow chart on the left side of the screen and tide-bits of information of postings are put in order of event (date & time). Information in RSS is in a nice and easy to read format without having to go to many websites.
In regards to Siegel’s article on “computer imagination,” I feel that RSS feeds can be used by students to filter and access information from the web. This gives them up to date information that they can glance at quickly and find the relative information, making them more efficient and productive. No searching many sites, just get your information dumped into one site. One imaginative educational use for blogs that I can see is that you could share events or cultural customs with people from different places in a timely fashion. You can even post comments or ask questions. I could see my student’s blogging with students from all parts of the world. Students not only write, but include pictures and embed videos in their blogs to educate each other. One of my colleagues uses blogs to make his room paperless and to check for understanding of what his students learned each day. This allows for him to post individual comments and answer some of those questions that the students didn’t want to ask in front of their peers. That alone is a plus in my book. I’m curious to find what other imaginative ways others thought to use Blogs and RSS in education.
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