Feedly me... Seymour.

I'm a little worried about RSS feeds. Why? I don't want to be flooded with a whole lot of stuff. I equate it to junk mail. I get a lot of good stuff in the mail, both at work and at home. Most of the time, I look at it quickly and determine that this is good so I keep it. The problem is I don't have time to read it at that moment... so I file it (put it in a neat pile on my shelf or desk). "No worries",  I say to myself, "I'll get to it later". Bigger problem is...later is usually a few months down the road. So what happens? that material I wanted for later is out of date and useless.

That's what I'm worried about with RSS feeds. I have a lot interest in many things...and I have really good intentions with doing most of the stuff that I want to do...but I just can't seem to accomplish it all. It's also like the early of days of email. I remember signing up for my very first email with Hotmail. There was one point in the setup where it asked you to select things that were of interest to you. I remember selecting all these topics that I thought defined who I was and what I like to know about all the time. And then...my email inbox would be flooded with all these articles that I could never read and I could never go back and undo those changes. So that's my concern with RSS feeds. I just don't want clutter in my mailbox or on my desk or in my virtual world. Man, I hope this doesn't like old man banter.

However, I got to say I do see the value in subscribing to RSS feeds. Things I WANT TO KNOW about will be delivered to me...not the junk that goes with it. For example, I have friends that have blogs and I want to know what's happening in their lives. I get to know about it. I like basketball. I want to know what's happening in the NBA, I can watch the highlights when I want to watch them...and I don't have to wait on TSN on TV and waste an hour of my time for them to deliver the NBA news that didn't get delivered or I didn't get to see what I wanted to see. Man, that bugs me!

The same applies professionally. I can keep up to date with the stuff I actually care about and need to know about. If I'm teaching a particular area in science and have found a source that I will check on periodically, I can have that delivered to me and follow that specifically.

Perhaps, I can follow my students. If I ask my students to keep a blog for school purposes then their material should be easily delivered to me...I don't have to go searching for their material online or even search my bookmarks for their blogs. It should automatically come to me.

Here's my screenshot of my Feedly page.

I have very good friends who are working as missionaries in South Africa. They run an organization called Seed of Hope, an organization that's helping a community to deal with and overcome the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Here's the link to their feed.
http://theseedofhope.org/feed/

I don't usually listen to podcasts, but I'm starting to see their full potential and the endless possibilities to implementing it in my class. I don't have any podcasts that I subscribe to...however, I usually listen in to a podcast that my wife listens to. She likes listening to a preacher, Herb Montgomery. So, here's the link to her podcast that I will listen in on. http://www.renewedheartministries.com/podcasts/podcast.xml

Here's a link to a set of Flickr images that I have recently subscribed to...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/robmacklin/
I had a little difficulty subscribing to feeds on Flickr. I had to sign up to use it.



The challenge now is to make sure I use it regularly in my teaching somehow.