RSS Reader

The sites I'm following are mostly blogs by kindergarten teachers and people who teach English in Japan. A blog that reviews foreign films, a blog called Forecast Earth, and two or three personal blogs. I choose these sites because they were of interest to me. My ideal job would be teaching kindergarten, so by following the kindergarten teacher blogs I've been able to read about some very creative lessons and the teachers experiences. By following the English in Japan teachers' blogs I've been able to see what teaching in Japan is really like. And I'll tell you what, at least where these people are teaching, it is nothing like programs like JET and other overseas teaching programs try to tell you it is. So,thanks to these blogs, I feel like my knowledge of what these positions have the potential to be like has already significantly increased. I also think that if I continue to watch these sites, and even follow some others with different view points or experiences I will be able to become a little more rounded in my knowledge of the subjects, and thus hopefully have a little bit better understanding of what to expect if I end up in any of the positions of the people in the blogs that I follow.

What was challenging about this activity was finding blogs that were actually worth following. It seemed like a lot of the blogs and websites that came up in the search were more or less useless. And before I could even search for anything, it was somewhat hard to figure out what I wanted to search for. Since I'm not entirely sure what I will end up teaching, I decided to just follow blogs from every subject I have considered. However, I wasn't able to find anything worthwhile about teaching Home Economics. Once I found something I wanted to follow, it was really easy to do so since I only had to click an icon, it would ask me if I wanted to follow that site, and viola!

As a teacher I think I could use a feed reader to alert students to blogs and things that I thought would be of interest to them, or would pertain to the lesson. Instead of writing DBQ's on the board, I could have them access the reader (or bring it up on a screen) , and have them respond to something from that and write about how it is relevant to our class. I could also do a kind of activity that asked them to follow a certain number of sites on a given topic, and report their findings after a week. Kind of like what we were asked to do for this journal assignment.

To further my knowledge of feed readers, I would like to learn how to make a Google RSS account public so that other people could view what I was following. I might also like to learn a little more about other feed reading sources. Also, it would be interesting to learn how other teachers have used feed readers in their classes.