Blogging about blogs

This week I have two cool tools that I am hoping will find a use in my classroom.

The first is more for me to use as a teacher who is always learning from others. I discovered Feedly. I am not sure how no one had ever shared this tool with me, especially in my days of crafting when I routinely visited scrapbookers' and card makers' blogs on a daily basis. It was inefficient to check each blog each day because not everyone posts on a daily basis. Getting email notifications of updated posts was a good reminder to check, but often these emails were lost amidst an inbox full of other emails.

Feedly is a great option for organizing frequently read blogs and for creating a centralized place to check for new posts on those blogs. As I was setting up my Feedly page, it seemed a little reminiscent to setting up a Pinterest board. Instead of having a Pinterest board of pins, this creates a Feedly page of blogs.

This is what my Feedly page looks like today:

I only have four blogs that I am watching right now, but this is a work in progress. (Don't you remember when you had just a couple pins on Pinterest and now you have multiple boards with lots of pins on each board? Just give me a chance. This is going to be a great resource one day!) To use Feedly, you choose which blogs you want to follow and you add them to your Feedly page. Those are mine listed on the left side. As your list of blogs grows, you can categorize the blogs by topic and/or interest. As authors post on their blogs, this feed (on the right side) shows up. To read the post, simply click on it. It is that convenient. This is a must have for all of you who follow a lot of blogs!

Setting this up is super easy. Here's a video to show you how, if you're interested:

The other cool tool I discovered this week is Adobe Spark. Have you seen pictures where someone has put text over the photo with a cool font or arrangement? Have you tried to do this with other graphics program, but got frustrated because it was so difficult to create? Well, you might want to give Adobe Spark a try.

This is useful to create a post, a page, or a video ... pretty much any graphics. Whatever you choose, the Spark actually walks you through the creation of your visual piece. There are format choices, including creating graphics for Twitter and Facebook. There are template choices. There are font choices. There are lots of choices at each step of the way in the creation of your graphics project. But what makes Adobe Spark so great is the ease of creating.

In no time at all, I created this post:

If you have a series of photos that you wanted to share, you could do so by creating a page. There are different ways to display your photos and different ways to present the page. It's a scrolling page, so there's lots of room for creativity.

You can even use Spark to create a video, like a storyboard. I have not had time to try this out, but from the tutorial, it seems to be a very user friendly program. 

Adobe Spark has potential, although I'll have to think about some ways I can use it in my classroom. If you have any ideas, feel free to comment and share with me!

If you have not already tried Adobe Spark but want to, here's a great tutorial to get you started:

Two great tools with so much potential. I can't wait to spend more time with each of them and to figure out how to use these with my students.