Bloglines- my new best friend

Getting into blogging is a bit overwhelming at first because there are so many directions that you can go with it and it's easy to forget to post regularly (which I am a clear example of). Through my reading, I found out about bloglines which is a fantastic website to help you keep the blogs that you follow organized. In the beginning, I was going to all of the blogs individually and it was taking forever. Now all I have to do is go to the bloglines website, log in and all of the blogs that I have subscribed to are right there for me and it tells me if they have been updated or not.

This would be a great tool for teachers to use in tracking if their students are updating or not. I talk a lot about distance learning but I see great uses for bloglines with that because then students are less likely to fall behind. Often with online courses, students get lost and the teacher has no way of knowing if each individual student is keeping up. If they have weekly assignments that they need to post to a blog, the teacher can check who has updated all in one place. It would take forever to go to each individual blog and see if changes have been made but with bloglines, at the click of a mouse, it is possible to see any updates that have been made.

It is my new favorite thing and has saved me loads of time so I suggest anyone who is interested in blogging or follows multiple blogs go to the website, Bloglines, and sign up for an account. Again, all you need is an email address. I want to end with a quote that I heard in my Education and Welfare class today that really made me think about education and teaching in a new perspective. It shows how important it is to make sure all students are keeping up and staying on track.

"The most critical period in a child's education is the transition from the stage where they learn to read to the stage where they read to learn"