Thing # 10 - RSS Feeds

Thing #10 has been an interesting experience for me. The whole process has been fairly simple to set up and I can already see how wonderful RSS feeds really are. I personally use GMAIL for all of my email needs and I am a huge advocate for most all of the features that Google has to offer. However, I have never taken the time to actually set up a Reader account. Now that I have one, I really appreciate the simplicity of it. As the apsu23things blogspot instructed, I searched different accounts and subjects that I found most interesting to me and that I thought I would take the time out of my busy schedule to actually read. The different ones that I subscribed to were Digital Photography School, Healthy Living, StepMother Matters, Cool Cat Teacher, xkcd comics. One of the main things that I like about RSS feeds is that the Google Reader account allows you to organize all of your interests in one spot. Conveniently, all of my RSS subscriptions and even the blogs that I have chosen to follow in the previous APSU thing requirement are listed together for my reading enjoyment. They are all categorized and show current listings and the total of past posts in each separate feed. This is very helpful, as the amount of blogs and sites that I want to follow is growing. The RSS feeds allow me to simplify my reading preferences by linking them to my Google Reader Account, which is very cool.

I definitely see how RSS feeds and Reader accounts can be extremely useful for teachers. With the massive amount of information at our fingertips and the amount of responsibility that  teachers have to be positive, prompt, and professional, having helpful "time saving" features such as feeds and reader accounts make life so much easier. With more information and educational tools that are made more easily accessible, teachers are able to become more efficient educators. As far as creating a public page, I chose not to. It is nice to know that I can do that in the future though.