Thing 2: RSS Feeds & iGoogle

The best thing about reserving my "CDLC Learns" assignment for Fridays, is that I can really learn from all my classmates that have struggled with the assignment before me.  After perusing the RSS sites this week, I really thought I was going to adopt Netvibes.  I had never heard of it before, so I thought it would be good to try something new.    Rose the Blogger has a lot of positive comments about Netvibes, and I really like the way the feed page for the CDLC Learns participant blogs looks when it is created using Netvibes - clean, concise, and all the recent posts neatly laid out.

But then I read many blog posts from people who were experimenting with Netvibes.  People were having a lot of trouble and many said things weren't working consistently.  When our fearless leader, Polly Farrington, discovered that Netvibes isn't consistently finding and updating information, and couldn't figure out why, I decided it was time to throw in the towel for the time being. 

I moved to iGoogle.  What fun!  Why had I never heard of this cool tool before??  I use gmail and Google all the time, but I had no idea iGoogle existed.  When I set up my page, I checked off that I like cooking, and before I could get started in customizing my page, I had so many mouth-watering recipes staring me in the face that it was hard to move along.  But move along I did, and soon had several useful gadgets and blogs up on my page.  My favorite is the "Birthday Reminder."  You put in loved ones birthdays, and it will list upcoming birthdays on your iGoogle home page.  I knew something like this existed on the big, wide Internet, and finding it was something I kept telling myself I had to do after missing family birthday after family birthday.  Thanks, Polly, for allowing me to finally sit down and find it as a class assignment.

I discovered that there is not one, not two, not even three, but FOUR Yo Mama jokes gadgets!  I guess the tradition of telling these jokes during school bus rides is universal.  I have one of the gadgets minimized on my iGoogle page so I can supply my kids with these ocassionally.  They will think I am so cool. 

I am toying with the idea of introducing this tool to my kids and Scouts.  It is very fun, extremely easy to use, and eye-catching.  They could learn a lot about feeds, blogs and organizing information.  There are lots of useful and educational gadgets, such as math games, SAT vocabulary flash cards, and Spanish word of the day.  Would these be the things they would really use, though?  Or, more likely, would they gravitate towards things like Super Mario Game of the Day and jokes of the day gadgets.  Then they would find out where I am getting my Yo Mama jokes from!  On second thought, this is one tool I am keeping to myself.