Overwhelmed by feeds...

Well, I have been using Google Reader for a couple days now and I can say that I am overwhelmed.  I went from not getting any pertinent news from the web to having so many feeds I am not sure I can keep up.  I am already having to put together a serious time budget to be able to juggle the new class work with my already overwhelming business and family life.  I am not complaining, just a little taken back at the amount of content that is generated on the web each day... I only hve about 10 RSS sources feeding in each day and I have hundreds of posts to read.  Some superflous, some with some great insight.

I did find and comment on one today advertising an event in my area.  The  Google Apps for Education California Summit which is being held this summer in Santa Clara... which is right down the road from me. I signed up already for myself and my wife who is a 2nd and 3rd grade teacher.

I certianly have learned that you need to discriminate which sources you subscribe to.  Many will not bring you the information you want, but if you are careful, you can get up-to-date news on anything you want.

Over the last couple of days I can see that some of the sites that I subscribed to don't do much in the way of updates, two of them no new information at all in three days.  Others, like  Free Technology For Teachers has multiple feeds each day on new hardware and software specific to the classroom. 

Now that I have learned about RSS feeds, I can see that it would be helpful in many of my business ventures to stay up on technology, current events and market trends.  I don't have the time, or make the time, each day to go out searching for the information, but if I can have it pushed to me, it would be more effecient for me to stay on top of things.

Delving into RSS Feeds

I have been on the world wide web for more than 30 years.  I publish websites, search for content and price out purchases.  Yet in all these years, I have never subscribed to a RSS feed.  How could I have missed such a time saving step?  Ignorance I guess.  In the last two days I have been researching RSS feeds as a means to stay up to date on particular subject matter.  I choose to use Google's Reader as I am well entrenched in Google's clutches.  As I added feed after feed of targeted educational blogs and news sites, I found that having the latest news and information about technology in education to be exceptionally valuable.  Check out a screen shot of my Reader Page below...

My reader feeds are being funneled into iGoogle and are shared publicly.  go to http://www.google.com/ig#m_32

Addendum:  I have been following my feeds for a couple of weeks now and find that the amount of great information coming from the sites I have subscribed to is a little overwhelming.  Yet, I have found some great resources... one site I particulary love is the Free Technololgy for Teachers site.  I have either bookmarked or subscribed to 6-7 different great tools such as DropBox.  I commented on this blog post and described how this tool allows my wife and I to share our work from the home office computers to the school computer without having to upload or email them to ourselves.  Just save into the DropBox folder and it is instantly available on all computers. 

I can see myself setting up folders for the different types of content that I would want to pull from the web and setting up RSS feeds for each folder.  When I am looking for educational materials or resources, I would open my Education folder...  In addition, I can see myself starting a Blog specific to my classroom and using it as a way for parents to stay informed.  I could make my Blog posts available via RSS and show parents how to subscribe to them to get up to date information and alerts.