RSS in my classroom

I've had a blast using RSS over vacation, as a matter of fact, I just got distracted for the past 20 minutes or so reading everything. I had to quit when I remembered that I had to do this!
I have streamlined the feeds that I've subscribed to as many of them can overlap. I haven't even checked out all of the places that I know I will find interesting feeds.
I don't see how I will use RSS directly with my students, it's not something that I would have them do in class. What I would do is try to get them to follow something that they were interested in, to stay current on a topic, sport, activity, etc. I hope to find some good fitness sites that are relative to middle school age groups. The ones that I found so far are not very active or exciting. If there aren't a lot of things out there right now, I'll bet that there will be in the near future!

Portaportals

I'm most comfortable doing technology and less comfortable talking about technology. When we started reading about the Portaportals I had one up and going in the next five minutes. I haven't gone back to work on it, but it was fun to think of all of the links I could come up with to include on it.
This is something that I could add to my website (that I haven't touched in a year) so that my students could connect deeper with a topic we covered in class or explore other aspects of fitness or skills that were not covered in class.
It isn't terribly exciting, but it's easy to set up and easy to access.
Did the people who came up with the name not realize how hard it was to say Portaportal without refering to those green and blue buildings? Excuse my immaturity, but everyone had to at least think that...

Blogs Since the beginning of Blogs

Reading through the different examples of bogs, I was impressed with how they seem to have evolved over the bast few years. No longer are they just a singular rant with endless repetitive responses. Now they seem to have more content, more information, more links, more attractive formats, varied ways they are being implemented, and so forth.
It appears that writing on a blog can be both formal and informal, but I think that informal writing is more of what I would be looking for in any application that I might use in my classes. We do very little writing in Phys Ed class and this would be a first experience for writing to be a part of our classes at all! Yet I wouldn't want kids to hesitate to respond or comment if they were worried about their writing to be judged in any way. Maybe that would change over time.
I think that blogging can contribute to greater learning because kids will have an opportunity to hear more ideas from more peers, to contribute more thoughts than they ever would have time to do in a classroom where time and opportunity are limited.
How Does blogging affect the WAY we read and write?