CEdu 534: Week 3--RSS and Blogs!

Well, I just figured out how to make a link to my RSS feeds on my Blogger profile page. It took some work and messing around. After "playing" with Bloglines and Google Reader, I must admit that I feel a bit overwhelmed. I do like Google Reader better in terms of navigation and loading RSS feeds. Bloglines does not feel user-friendly to me as I had difficulty in understanding how to load and edit feeds.

Below is a button from Bloglines for my blog. However, I don't understand its purpose as it doesn't link to my feeds.





Oh well, time to move on to other things. I have added more feeds to my Google Reader aggregator. It has been fun and informative to look at recent blog postings, baseball updates with the pennant race this weekend, and business education and finance sites. I can see where my students could make great use of RSS in Financial Life Skills. Keeping current on particular companies, industries, and economic news should be highly engaging and make for great class discussions. I was amazed that students at North have a feed sidebar. I tested the feeds at school this morning, using a student log-in, and was amazed that there were no filter or blocking issues. I was pleased to see how easy it will be for my students to add feeds and then read them. I know they will love this as we start our stock market simulation.

I have been frustrated with creating my wiki so far. I tried Wikispaces first but was not happy with the way in which graphics and formatting were added and modified. Next, I tried PBWiki, knowing that we have had good results with it in our Stritch program so far. However, as I attempted to build it this evening, the site became inaccessible as Firefox claimed there is a site or server problem. I will try again tomorrow but I was all fired up to get the wiki going. I have many ideas of what to add to my NorthFLS wiki and want to try it out.

Speaking of frustrations, I also lost the last section of our research paper for this week. For some reason, Google Docs was unable to save my work. I did save what I had in a Word document but still lost the ending. I think the best approach to take for this problem is to write and save a document in Word, then copy and paste it into Google Docs. No doubt Google Docs is great for its collaboration abilities, but it still is online and may have occasional connection, server, or saving issues.

CEdu 534: Week 2--My Use of Blogs!

I must admit that I have never read blogs, except for those of my peers in this cohort, until this week. To start with, I checked out Bill Michaels' blog at Newsradio620 website. I heard him mention it this past week and, with all of the commotion about Ned Yost's firing, I thought it might be fun to check out. His blog itself was interesting to read with excellent graphics and hyperlinks to related online articles. However, I did not see a method in which to reply/comment.
I dug deeper and checked out a hyperlink for "Message Boards." Here I found SportsBubbler.com which included 2,685 threads and 94,238 posts, just on the Brewers Message Board alone. Wow! Upon further investigation, I saw that person who posted had a profile, often an interesting username, and the number and rankings of their posts. Fascinating stuff!

I also checked out the NSBA Board Buzz blog, hyperlinked to a weekly e-mail I receive called Legal Clips from the National School Boards Association. As a business education teacher, one recent posting caught my attention. Called "Mortgage crisis emphasizes the critical role of financial literacy for today’s generation," this posting offered helpful resources for teachers, not just business educators, to use in teaching their students about spending, saving, and borrowing habits. I will search further for similar business education and financial literacy blogs, especially those that contain postings about current economic and business news.