Subscribe in a reader

I read a lot of things in Google Reader, it being possibly the best RSS reader on the planet. One of its main benefits over traditional readers is the ability to share feed items. And the true power is the ability to make an RSS feed of your shared items. Since some of you might find the feeds I read interesting, here’s an RSS feed of my favourite things.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/piku_random

It’s constantly updated, usually daily, as I find new things to read and tag. Consider it a meta-feed of other feeds. Each item in the feed will take you to someone else’s blog or website. I track 88 different sites using Google Reader, quite a lot of them being technology related or just plain weird.

This is more than simple, mindless blog regurgitation that the web is full of. I’m offering no commentary, no explanations of the stuff I find. If I read something interesting I’ll share it and it’ll appear in the above RSS feed. Subscribe to the RSS feed and you can also get a nice flow of random, interesting stuff.

Some of the sites I regularly visit include

• Coding Horror
• Daily Dilbert (in colour, without Flash!)
• Hack-a-Day
• XKCD
• Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

So open wide and accept the firehose of incoming data

When at Uni training to be a teacher we were introduced to the concept known as “work life balance”. The idea being you leave your work at work, and don’t bring it home, the intention being to stop us going crazy.

Yeah, work life balance meet the real world.

What they should be teaching new teachers is not how to manage their work and life, but how to adlib on the spot and make stuff up as they go along. Little coping mechanisms for when It All Goes Wrong, or when someone springs a surprise.

Like tomorrow. I have an all day ICT Booster day where me and another teacher are taking 15 year 9 students and doing a full day of ICT with them. Fine, should be OK if the kids don’t turn into idiots. Only I forgot to set some cover work for the lesson I should normally be teaching on Thursday morning.

If this was my training year I’d now be sat up till 10pm planning a lesson, making resources and generally having a bit of a controlled panic. Instead I’m writing this. Tomorrow I will go into work and pick out a random cover lesson from our pile, print off the worksheets (after modiftying them a bit) and leave them in the classroom. Job done.

They can make me a poster about Internet Safety. That’ll do. The non IT trained cover teacher can then just wander about trying to persuade the kids to keep off the Internet.

Oh, supposedly I have to write some year 12 reports for kids I taught six months ago. Right… OK… well I’ll do that in between my year 10 reports, planning next week’s lessons and preparing for my NQT final interview on Friday. Or I won’t. If they want reports they can ask for them.

Managing workload is easy - do the important stuff and leave the rest until someone asks for it. If it’s not important they’ll not ask again. And do the ten minute quick stuff immediately. Think of it as the Getting Things Done philosophy combined with the Dilbert mentality.

Monthly curry meeting tomorrow