I’ve made no mystery of my love for RSS and my dismay over its slow adoption by the masses.  I do most of my reading in a given week by means of my feedreader, and it is how I satisfy my inner news junkie.  I find myself trusting mainstream news sources less and less as their biases become more apparent and their propensity toward sensationalism becomes more irritating.  I prefer do-it-yourself news aggregation, especially when I can read it on my portable device of choice: my iPhone.

A couple of years ago, I purchased Byline to read my RSS feeds on my iPhone.  I liked that it syncs to Google Reader so that anything I read on the mobile device is marked read online.  It’s basic features met my needs at the time, especially since I considered my news habit to be very personal.  It was (as most things in my life seem to be) all about me.

In the months that have followed, my PLN has grown and matured and I now appreciate the social potential of RSS feeds.  We all follow some of the same news sources, but our individual interests and experiences (mine are comic books and marine sciences) lead us to read different things.  I make use of Google Reader’s sharing features much more now to pass along and comment on news that I discover.

And so, this week I went searching for a new iPhone app to access and share my RSS feeds.  After some research and suggestions from friends, I discovered Reeder.  I couldn’t be more impressed with an application.  It has all of the visual goodies of my preferred Twitter client, Tweetie, with all of the RSS reading/sharing features I would ever want. Read more »

What happens to educators when they leave the classroom and move up the ranks of school administration?  Is there some sort of “amnesia ray” that is beamed into their minds to erase all that they have learned about pedagogy?  Why do we teach educators using methods that would be woefully inadequate for students?

from Chloe Dietz (flickr)

I asked myself these rhetorical questions this week as I was “trained” in the use of our district’s new professional development component.  Blaming the high cost of hiring trainers and providing substitute teachers, our very large school district has purchased licenses for a new web-based PD product.  The entire website is based around teachers viewing video clips and then reflecting what they have learned from them.  Many of the clips are simply digitized versions of decades-old instructional videos that weren’t all that helpful in their original, analog, form.

Right now, this service is being presented as a supplement to existing face-to-face workshop opportunities, but how long will it be before this is the model for all future professional development?  I cringe at the thought that the advent of easy internet video streaming and pressing financial woes might inflict this type of boring, passive, meaningless education on professional educators.  But, that’s just the beginning…

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