Blogs and Twitter

I have been using RSS since it was assigned to create.  It fit my needs exactly.  There are lots of different types of things that I like to read about and I hated to spend the time finding the different sources.  Often on my way to look at National Geographic's Pics of the week I would get sidetrack by pics of stars, or other topics that caught my instant attention,  and I wasted time on without realizing it.  With RSS the stories/blogs are brought right to me, no more getting sidetracked.

1. Edutopia.org/blog- this is not just one blogger, but multiply people blogging on all different aspects of education, there is always a good one to read and follow.  the one this week that caught my attention was reading 2.0. I work with students everyday who are struggling with their reading comprehension so this was of interest to me.  And I had to agree with her after she brought up ideas for me to think about-where students do reading that we/teachers do not count as real reading, but it is.
2. Two Peas and a Dog is another collection of different blogs.  After much searching and reading the do all seem to be teachers, from primarily elementary and middle school.  What I like about the site is that it is separated into different categories, math, literacy, art, classroom management and more.  This seems to make it a one stop spot for finding any numbers of ideas you made need.  The blog also has links to  TeachersPayTeachers, haven’t looked into that too much but so far intrigued.
3. Evidence Based Living is the name of this site for blogs.  I came across it when doing research for another class and it came up with a blog on the topic of reading to infants and young children. http://evidencebasedliving.human.cornell.edu/2010/12/23/does-reading-aloud-to-young-children-make-a-difference/ As I looked further into the site I saw it covers many topics beyond education. One of the bloggers, Shari,  does cover education primarily.  The bolgs take scientific research and break it down into words and ideas that the common person can understand. The bogs do give links to the actually published research if you would want to read further for more understanding.  This seems like a good site for education and other parts of life as well.

Twitter-not a site that I have used before, and even now that I have an account set up I have not used it alot.  It seems to be for very short messages and/or links to somewhere else, RSS brings it to me.  I will make it a point to look at it and try to follow though because some students do and I have found some interesting people to follow.

1. @tweenteacher- A Middle School teacher who loves to talk ed policy and curriculum design- from what I have been able to see on her post they seem to be mostly links to other educational articles/websites/blogs, all sharing ideas.  This person will serve as another go to to find items on education in general that I will want to be update on.
2. @weareteachers-We offer ideas, inspiration & information for your best days & double that for your hard ones. Supporting kids means supporting educators, always-again a starting point to other items about education- today @weareteachers took me to @exittickets that took me to a blog http://exitticket.org/partial-byod/ about using byod in a high school, very interesting blog.
3. @goodreads- this is a link to a website that is a book review site.  I already use the site and have turned many friends who are readers onto it.  You get to list the books you have read and review them.  Then goodreads will make recommendations based on what you have read.  I think that this would be a good site for students to share what they have read and find other books that they would like.  You can see what your friends have read and check out their reviews too.

All in all I definitely will continue to use RSS and read the blogs.  I will make more of an attempt to follow twitter, but at times so much can be overwhelming.