What Does Reading Mean to Me?

I've always been a reader, and for most of my life I strayed very little from popular fiction and the occasional eccentricity that caught my curiosity. For the last 5 or 6 years however, I've found myself reading more and more about topics that are relevant to my work in schools and with students of all ages.

In addition to the many many books I've read over the last few years (perhaps a thread on my favorites is in order), there are a great many excellent resources freely available online. Whether it is an incredibly interesting blog, or an informative educational website, I have a list of over 100 sites marked for updates in Google Reader. Google Reader is a GREAT way to capture and collect updates to your favorite sites. I try to set aside some time every Friday to visit my Google Reader feed and see what new posts/updates have been made to my favorite sites. It is staggering what I've learned in this manner. If you would like to learn more about Google Reader, click HERE and visit one of the many tutorials on the service that will explain or illustrate how to use it.

Today, I want to share a promising new link that I found recently for reading about leadership, business trends, higher education trends, etc.:  If you are a young professional looking to add to your knowledge base and engage with some interesting content at the same time, you might want to add Online MBA to your Google Reader feed, and watch for new content being added regularly!  Being a visual learner, I especially like the infographics!

To me, reading means continuous growth.  Reading to me is as water and sun are to plants.  Reading gets to my core and provides the nourishment I need to grow personally and professionally.  I get as much enjoyment and learning from reading a book I disagree with as I do from reading a book that affirms my beliefs.  What does reading mean to you?

Cheers

My PERSONAL VISION for INTEGRATING Technology Into Teaching and Learning

A Personal VISION For Educational Technology in the GPPSD on Prezi

Testing New Video Resource

The Regional Resource Center in our Zone is exploring the use of a new digital content streaming service provided by discovery.ca.  I have access via a trial account, and I am exploring how smoothly the content can be used off-site.

It doesn't look like it embeds, but I can link to specific videos, such as THIS one illustrating how to substitute and solve square roots for different valued. 

If anyone has any experience with this service provided by discovery.ca, please let me know.  It looks very promising at this point but I would love to hear how it functions across an entire district in the long term.

EDIT: Whoops. It appears the content may not be shared with others via forums like class blogs, and perhaps Moodle. The link above will not open the media player unless the user is logged in to the site.  The next question is, how does this affect our use of the content?  Will this be a significant problem?  Or perhaps our students will be given the ability to create their own accounts as well (which I doubt)?  Some more investigating is in order.

Cheers