Last October I tried to get my students to use Google Reader as an RSS reader to gather news for a regular current events assignment. Though it all worked out pretty well, some students found it challenging. Of course, I wondered whether Reader was challenging them or my ability to explain it was the challenge. Google has now created a video to help explain the process, which may help out some of my kids when I work through RSS this coming semester.

As well, Common Craft has an excellent video on just what Google Reader is. It would likely serve as a pretty good introduction to the whole concept of Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

Update: (8 May) I showed my Semester 2 students how to gather current events feeds using RSS last February. The RSS experiment seems to have worked reasonably well. A few months later, without me requiring it of them, several students are still using RSS to keep up with current events.

Sometimes it’s easy to get frustrated at how readily technology is adopted in your school, or by the public at large. This 1981 video puts some perspective on that and suggests that we’ve changed more than we might realize at times.

In the wake of the new president’s swearing in last week, I stumbled across an Innauguration Speech Generator. It’s a kind of a cool little Mad Lib style activity where you fill in adjectives, nouns and verbs and it pops them into the appropriate places in an Obama style speech. As an English activity it’s lightweight and fun.

As a Social Studies activity this one is neat, too, because the Mad Lib template is fairly standard for a political speech. It would be fun to analyze it, throwing in your own verb and adjectives, etc, and then compare it to other politicians’ speeches. There’s likely a surprising similarity between them. A lot of rhetoric is thrown around but how much substance is there?

Interestingly, because of the domain (atom.com) hosting the speech generator, it’s blocked at my school. Hopefully it works better in your neighborhood.

Over the weekend I discovered Save the Words which is a site that asks you to save old, outdated words. Every year new dictionaries come out and drop older, little used words. Think of the treasures we’re losing.

To help the cause I adopted oporopolist and promised to use it whenever I can. For example: “After school I need to get some bananas on the way home so I should stop at the oporopolist.” They also included a funky certificate to commemorate my attempts to save this word.

Adopting words would be a great project for any class from the youngest to the oldest. Looking through many of the words I didn’t find any that were improper, though teachers should pay attention as kids will find ways to put normal words to rude uses.

It’s a great take on vocabulary building that you can turn into an entertaining and thoroughly goofy activity.

Today is Inauguration Day in the States and here in our little Canadian school we have the ceremonies being streamed over the Net in two different locations. This has really taxed our connection.

Tweets are coming in from my Twitter list from people whose school connections are also strained. People are unable to access overtaxed news sites. Many of these people are resorting to (horrors!) plain old network T.V.

The Internet has so much potential to connect people. The Net makes it so easy to give resources to people who couldn’t normally access them.

I guess our infrastructure needs to expand as today has demonstrated. The Internet is only as strong as its weakest link. None the less, the potential is pretty exciting. We can bring an event, a message, an idea to the farthest corners of the world. As I like to tell my students, we, as individuals, have a greater ability to communicate a message than anyone before us in the history of the planet.

Seeing the system fail today is not a reason to give up on the power of the Internet, but to expand it.