I have a love-hate relationship with professional development. On one hand, I always feel like I learn a lot and that I improve as a teacher. However, it's hard to find time to read articles or go to seminars. You're on your own for the seminars, but RSS feeds are an easy way to keep up with education news. For those of you who don't know, RSS feeds collect new articles from all of your favorite sites and gather them all on one page. This saves you a ton of time!
In the past, I've used Google Reader. However, I decided to try something new and sign up for a site on Netvibes.com. At first, I hated it. There are only two viewing options. The widget (read blocky) view was a bit overwhelming as it showed all of the feeds together. However, when I switched to the reader view, my NPR newsfeed took all the top positions, and it took a lot of scrolling to find what I wanted. A few minutes of googling later, however, I discovered that you can create different pages such as "News" for your news sites or favorites for the ones you like best.
If you'd like to see the end result, click here!
To help minimize the blocky look, one can edit the number of feeds that shows for each feed. If I were using a feed reader just for myself - I'd probably stick with Google, but sharing is easier with Netvibes. I like the cleaner sharing tabs.
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