Week Four - RSS AND NEWSREADERS

Thing #9 - Locate a few useful school library related blogs and/or news feeds.

So, I've spent some time yesterday and today looking through various blogs through the Edublog links, and found some interesting and not so interesting links. It seems that there would be potential to use this in a school library setting, but it seems unless there is a reason to have an interactive conversation going on, a web site might be a better way to communicate. I like the idea of finding a reason to communicate interactively with a blog, so far, the most interesting possibility to me is a book club. I've been playing with the idea of starting a book club blog ever since the CLSA conference back in November. We'll see.

I also took some time to explore the various search tools to find feeds. (Feedster seems to be temporarily working on some upgrades) I had some fun looking at the various offerings of the various other ones listed for thing #9. There's some great information to be had for sure. My hesitation with signing up for more information however, is that I fear that this will become way too time consuming to read and follow, and therefore will become another thing on my list of failures. I barely have time to read the headlines to the newspaper when school gets back in session, so I can't see adding more onto the list of blogs that I subscribe to.

I do like the idea of subscribing to some blogs though, like The Shifted Librarian, since there's some relevant topics there for me. First of all, I had never heard of freerice.com and I can see spending some time here, but more importantly my soon to be SAT taking high schooler can spend some time here as well. There was also a great discussion about gaming in academic libraries that lead me to this great site that is perfect for my always in need of mulitiplication practice fourth grader Academic Skills Builders So, my main thought about all this, is that is it really great, and there are myriad ways to find great, interesting and bizarre blogs and conversations going on in blogs, but you have to temper it with how much time you can truly devote to all there is to read.

With that, I must tear myself away from all the blogs and their links and start taking down the Christmas tree!

LLL2