Week Four

So I was thinking about our reading for this week and I really like the concept of RSS, really simple syndication. Instead of having to search for blogs or information I'm interested in, it comes to me. Again I really enjoyed the "In plain English" video because it makes it so easy to understand these technological concepts. I agree with the author of the ProBlogger article though that the best way to understand RSS is to partake in it. I personally am not a RSS user but now that I know how easy it is to create one I think I will. This is a great way to keep up-to-date with information in the classroom. Maybe an educator subscribes to a news feed and therefore can answer students questions on current events. If students have questions, this would be a good way to stay on top of them. Also if the students are writing a blog for class an educator can use RSS to be notified every time a student updates his or her blog. This way if a student does their blog earlier than the due-date, per se, the educator can read it at his or her leisure rather than being bogged down by multiple things to read when they are due. Also it would be a good way to know which students were on time with their entries and which ones weren't; all this convenience without having to go searching from page to page to read each of their particular blogs.

The other thing we were asked to do is create a Social Bookmarking site with all of the sites we found for this week. I decided to try out Mockatoo for my project. Mockatoo is a new site that is in it's first stages of social bookmarking. When I read about it it explained that what they have now is basically what they will have in the future but it may be tweaked. So in order to try something new I used this site. I was troubled with the language they used at first but then found that it was not too difficult to use. Of course the first step is to create an account with any e-mail address you choose. Once you have given them your e-mail they will send you a password to use. When you receive that you log in and press "Create a New Collection". It will ask for descriptors for your collection and at the end you have to add in any extra fields that you want to have. It provides the fields of "name" and "description" but anything else you have to add. Once I got passed that it was easy. I just clicked the add a new website (because I added website as a field) and plugged in the information. If you are interested at looking at the sites I found to be good teacher tools the address is as followed: http://www.mockatoo.com/index?collection=Edu-Tech+Sites&uri=%2Fmockatoo%2Fitem%2Foverview
I found this site to be pretty easy but it didn't have the "tagging" feature we discussed in class and read in the articles. Perhaps in a couple of days I'll try another bookmarking site to compare and I'll keep you updated! And that's what I was thinking...