RSS Feed

 Sumi - who insisted on sitting on me while I typed.

This past week I discovered the RSS feed technique of collecting and quickly perusing websites and blogs of interest.  I subscribed to NPR, several teaching blogs and site, and a couple of calligraphy blogs.  In the process of searching for sites to subscribe to, I found some I hadn't heard of before.  After a few days of getting the feed, I trimmed it a bit, so I wouldn't be overwhelmed by posts.  I also realized I could read them just in "list" format, which was much faster than the "expanded" mode.  I started to create folders, learned how to "star" items, tried out the "recommended" items, which are based (at least in part) on my history.  Found a few good items that way as well. 

Some of the info I get on the RSS feed duplicates posts I receive on Facebook (NPR, New York Times, Edutopia, Teacher Tom), but I can also see, if I were researching some topic in particular, that I could quickly gather information this way.  It still doesn't beat my old friend Google, though.  Whatever would we do without Google??

I have yet to attach my feed to a blog, partly because I don't know how to do it -- apparently I need code?  And partly because I still experimenting with the feed.  It might be worthwhile exploring how to do that, though.

I have also added some new categories and quite a few sites/blogs to my portaportal.  I found some great resources for my students, some good teacher sites, and some other interesting bits and pieces.
I like the clean visual layout of portaportal -- it's easy to navigate and click on links to all the different pages.  This will be very helpful when I have my students start to use it.

M.