Week Four Blog Post - Where Do I Get My News

When I set up my blog a few years ago, one of the first things I did was to set up a blog roll.  I found a series of bloggers that I was interested in reading more from and placed links to their blogs in it.  What was nice was that the roll updated automatically with the date and time of the last post.  When I asked my students to create their own blogs, I created a blog roll for them as well, and it allowed those to populate as well.  I never had a need for an RSS feed, and as such, never set anything like that up.

My wife finally convinced me to get a "big boy phone" a couple of springs ago, and, while I never thought I would need one, I now don't know what I would do without it.  I added the Flipboard app, and used my Twitter feed and the people that I followed to get whatever news I needed.  When I received my tablet for Christmas a year ago, Flipboard was one of the first apps to be downloaded, and is the first thing that I check in the morning, when I get home from school, and before I go to bed at night.  I suppose that this is a little bit obsessive, but with so much good information floating around, it is hard not to try and get as much information as I can.

Diigo is certainly among the greatest web 2.0 applications that has certainly come along.  It has become the repository of just about everything that I find useful for my classes, and with its connection to my Twitter account, anything that I favorite on Twitter ends up there as well.  I love that I can create any number of tags for my bookmarks, making them much easier to find.  I can save anything that I find interesting for and tag it for use later.

I did try to use Diigo with my classes a couple of years ago, but found it hard to have my students keep up with it in the way that I wanted them to.  I may go back to this in the future, but I am asking them to do so many things, it may take a while for me to get back to it.

As I read people's posts this week, I was interested to see how many people were not using any kind of bookmarking site.  I guess I was so familiar with Diigo, that I just assumed everyone else would be in a similar position.  It does give me more confidence that I can help people with their learning curve when it comes to tools like Diigo and that, by doing things like creating a group for our course on Diigo that will be used not only by this class, but, hopefully, courses in the future.