Monday, February 20, 2012

Thing # 11 Searching Good Feeds

For thing # 11, the best search tool that I utilized was the Edublogawards. This site was a wonderful search tool for educational blogs, as it narrowed down my interests for possible educational feeds in different web tool categories. For instance, Edublogs recommends the "best" :
After navigating through this site, I would have to say this is one of my favorite ways to find educational feeds to subscribe to. How much more convenient can they possibly make it? After reading the CoolCatTeacher's blog about the importance of picking the right circle of educators to follow, I realized that her advice held an immense amount of truth and benefit for personal growth as an educator. She recommended to go through trusted sites or individuals and branch from there, but to stay in the "know" with current educational happenings. Through Edublogawards, I was able to discover Journey in Technology. This blog is a wonderful educational technologies blog written by a female educator from Texas. She has creative posts and inspiring information that encourages the use of emerging teaching tools that can be implemented into a teacher's busy schedule.
The search tool that I found most confusing was the Topix.net. Although it had many blogs by specific topics, I felt that I had to search much harder to find more "accredited" individuals who actually were worth my time to read and follow. I do not want to be bombarded with too much information as I subscribe to many different feeds. So, I want to be very selective in my choices. I also found some other great blogs and sites to subscribe to, one being the Eric Sailers - Speech Language Pathologist blog. This blog really interested me, as it is written by an experienced Speech Language Pathologist who is implementing many new technologies into his work. His blogs are very thorough and even contain interviews and YouTube videos containing tutorials on these new technologies and the progress he is making in his field.
Some other ways that I was able to find fun feeds to follow was through Google blog search. This search engine was nice to experiment with, as I could search exactly the topic that I wanted. However, I did find some unusual blogs that were not really relevant to teaching. They were "listed" as educational blogs, but they had rap videos and party pics posted on their sites... This was a huge indicator to me that I needed to be more selective in the search tool that I use! Therefore, I feel like it would be more beneficial to first start with "most recommended" sites under Edublogs and then branch from there.

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