Ten things… #2 – Read blogs

Back in the old days (you know, before Twitter) I read blogs from teachers around the world to get ideas. I suspect this is the fault of Doug Belshaw who I ‘knew’ through the school history.co.uk teachers forum. He started blogging, I started reading. He blogged about other people, so I started reading their blogs too.

Then twitter hit, and the blogs seemed to dry up. But in the last eighteen months there seems to have been a real growth in teacher who have got into the idea of sharing their ideas with a wider community, but for whom 140 characters is sometimes not enough.

Visiting each blog in turn can be time consuming. Luckily one of the things that make blogs different from other websites is that they have ‘RSS Feeds’. You can sign up to these using a programme like Google Reader, and every time a blog is updated, that new post is sent to your reader. There are also services like ‘feedly‘ which create a magazine style format with your feeds (caveat – this isn’t a service I’ve used myself),

I’ve posted before about the blogs I follow (see here and here), but increasingly I’m finding blogs and blog posts via Twitter (which you signed up to yesterday, right?). Many of the speakers at TMClevedon also have blogs including Mark Anderson and David Diadu.