Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

How many feeds is too many? 50? 100? 200? I’ve got 250. To be fair, probably half of them aren’t very active and so they really don’t create much work or time to read. But I do have a number of feeds that rarely offer anything of value. My most useless feeds are:

1. Boing Boing.…very popular but total fluff. They usually have 20 or so posts per day and maybe I’ve found 5 posts mildly interesting. Not necessary but amusing. Can 39,392 subscribers be wrong? Change that to 39,391.
2. Tech Bargains…. nice if you spend alot online or are an American but for me I think I’ve only taken advantage of one offer.
3. NY Times Op-Ed…since they’ve moved to a pay model for most of the columns it’s a waste. I originally subscribed because of Thomas Friedman but he’s not free anymore
4. CBBC Newsround….I started a folder called Kids Feeds which was intended to find RSS feeds for kids. This is one I thought might be suitable but I’m not sure anymore. Still looking for a good kids news source. I’m still waiting for yahooligans to offer a feed.
5. “Classroom Blogging” news feed. I have this coming in from Google and Yahoo. In general I’m not happy with most news feeds. They tend to repeat too many stories from various sources and also the same story seems to reappear about 58 times before it dies.

Okay those are my top 5 worst feeds. I’m going to go and remove the subscriptions. I’m still frustrated by the number or times the same post gets republished. I know I’ve done it a few times after correcting or updating a feed but it seems that it happens more than it should from my other feeds. Maybe there’s a technical issue I’m missing here.

Anyway, maybe I should weed more often. Now I’m down to 245.

I think Google Maps and Google Earth should be incorporated into virtually every classroom on a daily basis. Rarely does a day go by in my routine where I don’t do a quick look up of a location or directions.

But here’s what I’d love a classroom to do:
Take this link filled with Google Earth/Map hacks and tools and sort them and categorize them. There are so many incredible applications. As a fan of 24, here’s a neat little application that plots the various locations of each episode. Not only that but most of the applications provide photos and links to additional information.

As Clarence wrote,

One thing I have seen this year is the kids grow and respond to certain tools. Some kids have turned in to great prolific bloggers. Other prefer our wiki. Some kids have made great use of their Bloglines accounts while others have hardly touched them. Now we are moving on to Skype. I have been discussing it with the kids in my class and now at least half a dozen of them have set up Skype accounts. I have learned this year valuable lessons about exposing kids to tools, teaching them how to sue them safely and ethically, and then allowing them to use those which suit their purposes best. While I expect them to be able to use any of the tools, I need to allow them choices and responsibility in their communication channels.

So there’s the challenge. Get your kids to dig into these tools and their value and post the findings.