Week 4 - RSS feeds

Sorry to have been away so long. Somehow, despite routine use of antibacterial hand cream, I managed to get the flu - guess viruses just don't recognize that brand of voodoo that says anything with "anti-" as a prefix should apply to them as well.
I did manage to get on Bloglines and set up feeds for 11 of my favorite librarian blogs. I can see how this will save me time instead of calling up each one. I knew full well that it would, and I should, but like cleaning out the kitchen catch-all drawer, it is just something I never got around to. Thanks for the nudge.
In browsing through some of my favorites, I did find a good idea posted by Doug Johnson (who is always full of good ideas) for Flickr. He says:
"Last year I wrote about Fastr, a game that uses Flickr images. "It loads ten images that all share a common tag, one by one, and you guess what the tag is. When you guess right, the tag will turn blue, and you'll get points. The faster you guess, the more points you get." I haven't looked at it for awhile, but Joyce's post alerted me to some updates. Now you can play Fastr in German, Spanish, or French! What a great way to build vocabulary...IF you are good at getting inside people's heads to guess how they'll tag."

I liked the advanced search in Topix.net. I felt like I could refine the search best in this product. I tried searches for topics that classes are now doing and liked the results best with this service.

School Library and Classroom Ideas:
I can see how setting up a news RSS feed would allow you to customize content for student projects. I will need to try it to see if any of services can get by our overly zealous filter. Right now I could set one up for students who are researching Darfur and another for a sustainable agriculture project.