Part of what I hear from teachers is that they simply don’t have time for a lot of professional development, especially self-directed explorations of edublogs.  As a teacher, I know they speak the truth.  However, just like our students, we need to be life-long learners, exploring ideas, harvesting and manipulating information to create new personal understandings.

One of the best tools I have been turned onto lately (thanks to Craig Duplessie!) was netvibes.   Netvibes is a personal home page builder that allows individuals to build an efficient, one-stop, educational shopping experience.  By building one or more tabbed pages using RSS feeds, a net user can establish one interface for personal email, news, blogs, pictures and even podcasts. 

I have been using it for a couple of weeks and it certainly has simplified my daily information gathering.  I can check on new posts (it will actually remember which posts you have already read) on my daily edublogs, monitor my flickr pics, see if I have new email.  On a second tab I have news and weather feeds.  Instead of slogging through a number of web pages via my browsers favorites, I now have one stop (actually it is my browser homepage) and within two minutes of signing in I am updated on new blog entries and news.  It even updates live!

The use of RSS feeds and other aggregators is imperative to making life simple for teachers who struggle with time constraints when looking for add to their personal knowledge and ideas base.  I am planning a session at Ed Tech Atlantic 07 on just these issues – “Do-it-yourself” PD. 

These solutions are not without negatives.  They might tend to limit the “voices” to a chorus preselected by users.  However, engaged learners also know that these chosen voices can lead to further exploration through on-going links to other voices.  The choir can be endless. 

  technorati tags: education, netvibes, technology

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