Stirring Up the Dust

One of the questions I asked myself when I began this blog was, “Who is your audience?”.  In my thinking, my audience would be educators and others like me who were somewhat new to the Web 2.0 technologies with a great desire to learn more about them.  In learning to use them for ourselves, we would be laying the foundation necessary to introduce the technologies to our students for use in our classrooms.  Therefore, for some of the more seasoned bloggers and technology pioneers, much of the information I post in these beginning stages may seem very primitive.  I hope so.  That means it is reflecting my learning from the ground floor up.  I do hope one day in the future to look back on these first entries and laugh at the simplicity of what I see.  However, for now the simple side is where I am and where I need to be in order to draw others into the “web”.

The most technical terms I used in my last post about Bloglineswere aggregator and RSS.  I found a really great video on YouTube that explains RSS (Really Simple Syndication) in simple terms.  My hope is to post it here so that you can see it too.  This is my first attempt at putting a video onto my blog.  I hope it works!  If not, I’ll keep trying until I get it right. After all, this is a learning experience for me too.

On the tool bar above (as I type this post) there is a yellow button with an “A” on it.  When I place my cursor on that button, I see the words “Embed media links, YouTube, etc.”  That is where I will start.  Okay, once I did that another window opened which told me to place the URL (or web address) of the media link.  I went to the video on YouTube and copied the link.  Then I pasted the link in the window.  Some text then immediately appeared on my post below the last thing I had written.  Now I’m really not sure what to do.  I think I’ll post the blog and see what it looks like.  If it’s not what I want, I’ll start editing. 

Oh my gosh!  It actually worked!!  You’ve just witnessed my learning experience for the day!

I hope you’ll watch the video to get a better understanding of RSS feeds and the benefits of a reader or aggregator.  Too, please notice the comment left by Dr. Frank Buck on my last post.  He gave information about a different aggregator he uses.  Thanks, Dr. Buck!

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