RSS in Education

I have learned so much in the past two weeks completing my RSS assignment.  Learning about RSS was exciting, but also I was a little frustrated.  Exciting because RSS has greatly changed the way I access information on the internet, but also frustrated because I have wasted so many hours surfing the web without it!  Like many of my students, I can easily get distracted by pictures and headings that pique my interest when I should be focusing on the task at hand.  Having the articles organized and displayed in one location is wonderful.  The ability to control the content and organize it by category allows me to create a news feed that makes sense to me. Another aspect I appreciate about RSS is being able to preview the articles, reading only those that interest me.  Searching for new content is so easy and I have already found new blogs and websites that I wish I had known about before.

Prior to this assignment I had played with screencasting programs, but had no idea of the features that were available.  I used Screencast-o-matic and began by narrating my video as I recorded my screen.  I used powerpoint to create the slides for my video.  The second recording I made was using a script, recording all of the audio, then adding in the slides separately.  I really liked how the final product came together using that method.  I can tell a difference in my voice and I like the more animated sound I heard when reading a script.  I will definitely be using screencasting and creating more tutorial type lessons for my classroom.  If I move to flipped teaching lessons, making videos for my class will be required.

Finally, in this assignment I had to allow myself to make mistakes and live with them.  I have played with the captions on my video for several hours now.  I had two separate tracks of captions and can't seem to figure out how to merge them together.  I finally just made a new track and disabled the other two.  I didn't realize how much I strive for perfection and the frustration I feel when I can't get it right.  Good life lessons.