RSS Page Reflection

I have been following my RSS feeds for the past few weeks. I'm a little nervous about this assignment because I'm not sure if I'm doing everything correctly although I have learned a lot from using RSS feeds. 

I left a few comments of a few different pages, but this blog page from ilearntechnology.com was probably the most full-filling.  Above is the page and the comment I posted to the blog. The blog talked about how a guy is going to donate 1 cent to a charity for every visitor he gets on his site.  His thinking is that he can do a lot with a little.  I think it's a cool concept because I'm constantly, as a Geography teacher, to try to get my 8th graders to think globally. 

The pages had a wide variety of topics on a daily basis. The concepts covered in class were generally found on a few of my pages of my reader.  For example Technology in the Middle  covered digital citizenship and how to setup guidelines for your students in and out of the classroom.  This changed of the next few days because it went from living in the 21st century with digital citizenship to incorporating classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird.  The posted discussed how you can turn a classic like To Kill a Mockingbird into an interactive Prezi review.  I found this very useful in my job because often I run into a teacher whom is reluctant to use 21st century technology in their classroom and wants to stick to the classics.  This is the best of both worlds.  Too many times technology is overwhelming for these teachers and they do find a correlation between the classics and the new.

The scariest but most important thing I learned from the news feeds was the important of digital citizenship.  This is a scary concept because as a parent I need to form an action plan for when my children become a digital citizen.  I read that children born in today's world have hundreds of baby pics on the net being stored at different websites for easy sharing and photo transformation.  After watching some of the videos from the news feeds on how things are stored online and then scan later for viewing is  a scary concept.  Imagine if your child's naked bath photos were online and then access 10 or 15 years later by their friends or even worse a predator!  Could you imagine the embarrassment or potential harm that might become of it? I think it's important for all parents to think before they post and it's important for all teachers to explain this to their students.

Recently after subscribing to some RSS feeds and reading some blogs, I've decided to incorporate this concept into my classroom.  All my students have created wiki pages where they have their own space and page, so this week we talked about how to subscribe to an RSS feed on classroom concepts.  For example students will pick 1 feed to start to follow.  After following for a week they will blog about the feed.  After they blog on the feed, another students will edit their wiki.  The edit will be a post on questions or a reflection of what they learned.  This will incorporate digital grouping and editing an revising.  Not only will students practice their English skills but they will be learning interdisciplinary current events by reading the blogs.  Hopefully I will get other teachers on board with this concept and we can expand this project a little more.

Even though I was a little scared in the beginning, I found this classroom project to be very useful.  I learned that you can do a lot with only a little.  I also learned that one can incorporate the old with the new.  In this every changing world, I found that you must think before you post and think how one click can change anyone's tomorrow.  The most useful thing I learned was how to set up a quicker more efficient way to find and reflect on current events in social studies.