Meredith Fear sits in her room doing her homework. Books are scattered about, and a computer monitor glows before her. She is working on two Word documents and has four Web sites open. She checks her school e-mail account, her Bloglines news aggregator, and Furls of an online article for her independent study. She quickly transitions from this to respond to group members on Instant Messenger who have attached PowerPoint slides for an upcoming class presentation.
"The computer gives me a contact to all the people I need to talk to," Fear says. "It's a gateway to the world."
McHale specifically refers to Furl, which I have written about previously,
and to Bloglines, another of my favorite applications.
Bloglines is a news aggregator that you can set up a personal account on for free, which makes it popular with students, if they know about it. It is also popular with bloggers and teachers who have their students using blogs for some assignments.
Once you set up your account, you add the blogs and/or sites you like to follow regularly. Then you can go to one site and get caught up in your web reading. The bolded sites have new material since the last time you went on bloglines, and the number in brackets after show how many new posts.
Once you click on a site, you can read the beginnings of the article on the right. If you are interested in it, you can click on the link, and go to the actual site or blog, here George Siemen's Connectivism Blog.
Bloglines is a very useful tool for the learner using the web as one of their learning tools. Try it, or another news aggregator out;->
tags
digital natives
furl
bloglines
2 comments:
Hi Gardner!
I can barely keep up to my bloglines now, and I keep discovering more wonderful stuff!
Bloglines is one of the best in providing high quality information. Everyday, new things are being introduced allowing subscribers to be adept with almost everything necessary to succeed in life.
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