LISD Ed Tech Connection

Frank Miracola is a highly respected educational technologist at Macomb ISD. He often speaks at state and national conferences. Frank has created a new web page to compliment his “Free is Good” PD session. At this time, the site features 10 free video tutorials that focus on free software applications that can be used by teachers or students. They all feature Frank’s genial style. Want to learn how to use Photo Story 3 or Rubric Maker and Citation Creator? Check out Frank’s FIG site.

If you are a person who is really getting in to reading various blogs or listening to podcasts, it may be hard to keep up. Perhaps it is time to start looking at using the power of technology to send updates on all of those blogs and podcasts and whatnot to one place – an RSS feed reader. Here’s a quick description of RSS from Trey Martindale as written on his blog Teachable Moment -

Essentially, it is a new way to get information. It is an automated service that retrieves what you request, and then arranges the content so that you can peruse it at your leisure (and who doesn’t love leisurely perusing?). RSS is akin to having a cadre of personal librarians at your beck and call. And these librarians never tire from scampering around the Net, collecting all the news, updates, articles, search results, podcasts, multimedia, and other stuff you request. Here’s one more analogy–it’s like having your own completely personalized newspaper, brought to your doorstep daily (or hourly, for that matter).

RSS feed readers let you subscribe to RSS feeds from sites that you may frequent. Some RSS feed readers cost money and some are free. One popular, free RSS feed reader is Bloglines. If you are interested in setting up a free Bloglines account and subscribing to some RSS feeds, here’s a pdf handout from the 2006 MACUL conference and a Lenawee ISD Web 2.0 workshop to help you: Creating a Bloglines account and subscribing to an RSS feed

Here’s another resource from Will Richardson, who writes the blog Weblogg-ed the read/write web in the classroom, formerly with Hunterdon HS in NJ – RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators