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| Perfect Stilettos |
Imagine that you have a black tie event to go to on Saturday night. Of course to complete the outfit you need the perfect pair of stilettos (sorry guys!) So what do you do? You go shopping at every shoe store you can find. Of course, the perfect pair of stilettos are never found where you go looking first. After looking for a while and becoming exhausted, you go home and figure you have time to go back and look again another day. A few days later you go back to that same first store and lo and behold, the perfect pair of stilettos are right there on the second shelf beside the bedazzled stilettos that you would never even consider wearing. They are brand new in stock so it is a good thing that you returned to find the shining shoes. Shopping for a pair of shoes is just that; exhausting, time consuming and you never know when the perfect pair are going to come in stock at a store that you have already checked.
This is how I sometimes feel when I am looking for information on the internet. One day I could search and search for art lessons and never find anything inspiring. A day later I can return to the same site and all of the sudden they have the perfect project just waiting for my arrival.
How often do I have to return to a site in order to ensure that I am not missing the important things? Thanks to Google Reader and RSS, the answer is never! Basically, my stilettos come to me!
RSS - "real simple syndication" according to Wikipedia (2011). That is exactly what Google Reader is! Real simple and it organizes common information. With my Google Reader account, I never have to worry about missing those new possibilities that get posted to websites that I have already visited. As Richardson (2010) states, its "getting the good stuff when I want it" (pg. 77). If I find a site that frequently has information that is useful and I enjoy reading, I simply have to subscribe to the site and all the new posts will be sent directly to my devices.
Google Reader in Plain English
Over this term, I have subscribed to many sites, from our course blogs, to blogs outlining technology in primary classrooms to blogs about my community of Fort McMurray.
The biggest thing that I have found is not to get too carried away with RSS feeds. At the beginning, I would read a post, enjoy it and subscribe to the blog. This meant that I received every post created on that blog. This led to an overwhelming number of posts being delivered to my devices, many of which I had no interest in reading. Just because I liked one post did not necessarily mean that the overall blog was for me. I have become more diligent at looking over the blog of the post that I enjoy prior to subscribing to see if it is worth my while, or subscribing temporarily to see whether or not I would enjoy reading it on a more consistent basis.
With this in mind, the idea of "shopping" for information on the web becomes a lot more simple. I can now stay on top of my Google Reader account, which has actually allowed me to develop a meaningful list of blogs that account for a portion of my Professional Learning Network. The blogs that I follow are there for a reason and I enjoy seeing the inspiring ideas that come from them each day.
References
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs,
wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Wikipedia contributors. (2011).
RSS. Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia. Retrieved November 20, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss
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