What Works For Me

After reading Will Richardson’s (tl;dr) and Free Tech for learning (What I Read First) recent posts, I thought I’d get this blog restarted by explaining how I find the ideas and information I use in my daily work.

First of all I use Google Chrome as my browser. I used to use Firefox, but switched when Google Chrome came out and haven’t looked back since. I have 6 tabs open to start. iGoogle, Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook (at home, its blocked at school) Google voice and my Delicious bookmarks. iGoogle has just a few tabs pertaining to news, sports and weather.

In Google Reader, I have organized my feeds into categories such as Leadership (which is mostly ed-tech), Creativity (a mixture of feeds ranging from All Things Workplace to Presentation Zen to Seth’s Blog),Fablevision (Stellar Cafe and T.J on a Journey) iTouch, and a few others. Of these feeds and categories, I tend to read the Creativity, Fablevision, Leadership and iTouch categories first followed by blogs from Will Richardson, Dan Meyer, Gary Stager, Larry Ferlazzo and Free Technology for Teachers. Often I do not have time to fully read a post so I tend to leave it as unread or mark it with a star to read later. Occasionally, I’ll add it to my delicious page, but truthfully it tends to get lost easier there. Posts that I like are also often marked as unread. I read a lot but am not really active in leaving comments… something I need to work on.

On Twitter (@techicebreaker), I tend to scroll back to catch links or ideas that I may have missed when they came through the first time. Much has been said about Twitter not being useful or even being silly. I find that it is sometimes easier than tech support at times and you get out of it what you put into it.

My delicious bookmarks (techicebreaker) are (somewhat) organized by grade level as I like to collect resources for all grade levels and interests. I try to share links with others through the network feature, but don’t have many teachers in my district that use delicious.

I also use Scribd http://scribd.com (techicebreaker) as well. I find that more people have read my writing there than on this blog.

So that is what works for me. What works for you? How do you find (and share) the ideas and resources you find?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *