Thing #11 Finding Good Feeds

This "thing" turned out to be VERY time consuming! This was primarily because one interesting blog led me to another blog that led me to read yet another blog and so on and on I followed until I forgot where I found the original interesting blog! After about a week or so of my seemingly endless search for a few good feeds, I finally decided to reflect on what I had learned thus far.  I needed to prioritize and fast! So I went back to the APSU 23Things blog and started with the six questions asked in the discovery exercise.

The method of finding feeds I found easiest to use would have to be the method that sent me into this frenzy in the first place.  I just went with the flow! First I selected one of the sites suggested, Cool Cat Teacher, and from there I discovered one interesting lead after the other and I ended up with four blogs to follow in my Google Reader (in addition to a few of my classmates' blogs).

I also used a couple of the search tools listed and Google Blog Search was the most user friendly in my opinion.  This tool was the least cumbersome and most direct method of the few.  Neither Topix nor Technorati were particularly confusing just overwhelming.  Although there are tons of useful and interesting blogs available, there are just as many outdated and, well, misinformed people exercising their right to free speech in the blog world.  Weaving my way through some of the "junk" turned out to be way more time consuming than I had expected. Fortunately the four blogs I found most useful were Free Technology for Teachers, Cool Cat Teacher, Dangerously Irrelevant, and Bellringer.  All of these blogs seemed to have teachers as their intended audience, were written by educators, and were up to date for the most part.

As it turns out, during my quest to discover "good feeds" I also came across several useful websites as suggested by some of the bloggers.  These are sites where I can find detailed lesson plans and other ideas to use in my classroom.  I was also able to bookmark the websites for future (and current) use.