ElasTECHlearning

I’m starting what I hope to be a weekly post, staying true to a few real friends of the teacher – the schedule (weekly) and the alliteration. Hence, this weekly post will be called Tech Tip Tuesday, but I think I’ll just post it under the tag/category TTT. Anywho, on to the tip.

There is a lot of information on line. When you find things you like and find useful wouldn’t it be nice to have them all in one place? Sure, you can try & remember were those bookmarks are in your browser, but sooner or later your bookmarks are going to look like my basement!

The more people work online, the more we realize the tremendous amount of information there is to juggle. That’s where Feeds and RSS come in. You can read about feeds here at Wikipedia’s RSS citation, but there are a couple of tools that can really help you juggle all that information.

Bloglines. Bloglines is a free web tool that allows you to harness the power of RSS and create your own, online compendium of information. Read Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn’s promotion of Bloglines: 23 real simple steps to making your Internet life much better.

Google Reader. Google Reader is similar to Bloglines, but you will have to create a Google account. I recomend it, but caveat emptor: you will end up with a new Gmail email account!

Pageflakes. Pageflakes is similar to Bloglines & Google Reader, but lets you organize your information in widgets.

The important thing about all these tools is that the information you store in them stays current. This is because they all run on RSS feeds. Once you create the feed between your Bloglines account and, say, ElasTECHlearning, any new content is always the first listed in your account.

There are some great educator blogs listed in the left navigation of this page if you want a head start. Leave me a comment if you’d like to look at one of these solutions together to harness The Power of The Feed!