RSS Reflection

First screenshot, 10/27

I’ve never used RSS feeds before, and my immediate reaction to this assignment was to freak out about having one more thing to keep track of.  After settling down a bit and taking some time to see how things work and follow my feeds over a few weeks, I am seeing the value in them and really appreciating my reader site as an invaluable resource for finding new ideas and feeling more plugged in to education and technology issues.    It is a great place to go to kill a little time (productively).


So far, my favorite sites to follow are the blogs.  I’m following a few blogs about mathematics education and/or technology in education.  They are helpful for a couple of reasons.  First of all, they are helping me to get back into the mindset of classroom teaching.  I have been out of the classroom for awhile teaching one-on-one, but I’m considering a career change next year.  The feeds from math teachers are getting the cauldron that is my brain bubbling again, mixing in all kinds of ideas and inspiring me to imagine myself back in front of a class.  A great example of a blog that does this very well is Math Teacher Mambo , a blog written by a high school math teacher from Texas.  She’s a pretty regular poster, and over the last few weeks, topics have included trigonometry and geometry lessons, thoughts on student interactions, and substitute teachers.  One posting that spoke to me was a note about having a rough week.  I read it at the end of my own rough week, and it inspired me to comment, thanking her for reminding me to be reflective and learn from the tough times.  Her blog also includes pictures of some of her presentations and a great little library of worksheets, which I will probably be using in my current position (I’m always looking for resources like this).


I’m also following dy/dan , a blog from a doctoral fellow and math teacher who posts interesting ideas that address educational technology, math education, and education in general, sometimes all at the same time.  These postings are helpful for me because they make me think about connections between all of the things I am interested in professionally.  Continuous Everywhere but Differentiable Nowhere  is another reflective blog from a math teacher in Brooklyn.  His experiences teaching calculus and algebra and reflections on student learning give my brain a good workout.  I am finding Hack Education  to be a great resource for issues in educational technology.  This blog has turned me on to some issues I would like to address in our SIG, such as the digital divide and electronic texts.


So, my initial apprehension has (as it often does) turned into appreciation.  I definitely see the value in using an RSS reader, and will continue to add more sites and blogs.  This experience has made me realize how inadequate and limiting my previous methods (mostly Google searches) of information gathering and idea forming were. I have been exposed to more new ideas and issues relating to education and ed-tech over the past three weeks than I have in the last year.  I plan on continuing to use this resource as a way to stay plugged in and as inspiration for the direction of my professional views.

Current screenshot, 11/11