First, I don't use RSS at present. The reason for this is that I don't follow any blogs regularly. This isn't to say that I wouldn't, but I don't. For me to start following a blog it would need to meet some fairly rigid criteria, I think. First, it would need to be informative, and probably technical. It would need to be interesting. It would need to be useful to me -- probably useful in a professional sense.
This last bit would be tricky. While I am a librarian in training, I am also a teacher at present. Today I am a teacher. As such, a blog would need to be teaching me how to be a good physics teacher to be spectacularly useful right now. They exist, I know this. However, I don't know of any right now. I might by the time that the year is out.
The personal blogs really don't hold much interest for me. There are several blogs and social sites I could follow (and probably should) as they belong to friends from church, friends from former places of employ, and my students (past and present). However, one thing keeping me from starting is that there are many of them and only one of me.
The other thing is that I would have to act on any information that I found on a student site, if you know what I mean. I don't want to appear to be hunting down students. I've needed to, and it's not fun. That is one "computer guy" job that isn't fun.
As for using technology, I use a computer almost daily, but at present I'm not doing anything revolutionary with it. I'm tracking grades and attendance and emails. That really is about it. The one thing that I did discover is that there are some weird things about the grade program. I say this because I've used (and trained other teachers) on a few others. This one is just weird. You have to create a new page of grades every tenth assignment. The "final" grade on the page is the grade to that point, and you have to flip to the last page to get a really, real final grade. I suppose that this would allow me to get grades through a certain point in the class, and maybe that's a good thing. I'll have to think about it. It is weird though.
As for the VIC classroom, there is a quote that applies:
"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the
drain!" -- Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
I kind of agree with you on the RSS thing, Keith. I only set up my Google Reader to keep up with the blogs for this class, and I'm not thrilled with how it works. I haven't figured out if I can change this yet, but my reader automatically "marks as read" an entry once I scroll past it, even if I haven't read it. If I wanted to come back later to make a comment, it would look like I'd already taken care of that one, and I might skip over it. Erg.
ReplyDeleteI do keep up with a few blogs, but having them all in one place would probably cause me to waste more time, actually--because then I would want to read all the updates instead of just the ones on the site I remember to visit that day.