Thing 10-- RSS Feeds

I am so glad that this project is teaching me all sorts of things that I have seen online but had no knowledge of... I have been a blogger for quite some time, and I have noticed the orange "RSS Subscribe" button so many times, but I didn't know how useful this Web 2.0 tool would be to me.

I am now officially a girl in love with Google Reader! I chose Google Reader for several reasons. First, Google and Blogger are linked up and signing up for the reader was very easy. Secondly, it seems that Google has so many tools that, for simplicity, I will keep a lot of my preferred online tools in one place. Third, with the Google Reader, a user can completely skip the step of clicking an individual page's RSS button and just enter a URL into the reader. I spent quite a bit of time playing with my reader and adding my favorite blogs into it. I was happily surprised that the reader is not only plain text, but it does include the pictures and videos of the blog posts that you would normally find on the home blog. I imagine I will still have to access the blog page to comment, but this tool makes reading blogs so completely easy!

I created a public page! I am so excited by it! I am not sure how interesting my page will be to others, but I am certainly glad that I can easily access my favorite blog posts that are meaningful to me. I also think that I will use this tool in my future classrooms. Having students compile a page with their own favorite blog posts: ones that they find interesting and/or helpful to them would be a great way for them to use technology to their own benefit and to take ownership of their own learning!

All in all, I love RSS!