Your Own Clipping Service for Gifted Education
This is the 117
th blog I have written since its inception. It’s challenging to keep up-to-date on all things gifted and to come up with new ideas. Like everyone else, I need resources to help me achieve this. One of the many resources I use falls under the category of
Web feed aggregators. You may also find these helpful.
Are you a parent of a young child who is gifted? Do you feel isolated in this role and wish you could get regular advice and also hear from other parents of young gifted children?
Are you a teacher who wants to better understand your high-ability students and improve differentiation techniques?
In the not too distant past, high-ranking individuals would hire clipping services to cull the newspapers for articles that might be of interest to a particular industry or geographic area. Now this collection of data is automated through the Internet and can be used by a much wider variety of people. One application is gifted education. Rather than hiring a clipping service or spending a lot of personal time and money buying and going through various news resources, individuals can now subscribe (for free) to Web feed aggregators.
Google Reader and
My Yahoo are just two examples of aggregators. You can use a search engine to find more possibilities. When you sign on to any of these aggregators, you can add specific Web sites and be notified every they add new content.
Any time you see the letters RSS on a Web site (notice the RSS feeds under Categories in the left column of this Web page), you know that the creaters of the Web site want people to know whenever it is updated. Blogs and forums are great examples of this.
If you go to any aggregator and add Prufrock’s Gifted Child Information Blog or Prufrock’s Gifted Education Blog, you will be notified on your personal page every time either of these blogs is updated.
You can also do a search on a Web feed aggregator for specific words or topics, just as you would on a regular search engine to find and add Web sites to your list.
Google Alerts is another tool that you can use. This is still in the beta stage. I have told the engine that I want to see all articles that are posted on the Internet using words such as
Gifted Education,
Gifted Child,
Gifted Student, etc. I also told the system that I want to be notified every day about new articles that are posted. A list of articles then appears each day in my email inbox. This is probably be overwhelming to most people, but I want to keep on top of all information that has to do with giftedness so that I can keep you informed.