I'm dizzy

I wish that all this work in techno land corresponded to calories burned in the real world. Creating accounts to blog, rss, podcast and the like is more work than I had expected, and I am begining to wish that I had used a common name and password for them all.

As I was looking as candidates for my RSS feed, I thought back to my astronomy class last year. I had them do an article review once a week on something related to space. Unfortunately, I had many students do the same article which was suspiciously the first one they would find on a google search. Having an RSS feed of articles pertaining to astronomy would shorten the amount of time they would spend researching and likely broaded the topics they researched. Of course, I am still limited by the necessity of all of my students having access.

Also I had a thought that via blogs and RSS feeds, we could read a book as a class and never discuss it during class time. If I have each student create a blog and post every chapter, then we could RSS feed all the posts by chapter to get a nice summary of what everyone thought. Then each student could react to the summary and so on and so forth. I think this is a great way to add some sustanance to AP and honors classes, without taking up instructional time.