TMI (Too Much Information)

Too much information can be crippling when trying to stay up-to-date and in-the-know at work and at home. As teachers, we check our school email and personal email. We listen to our school, home, and cell phone voicemail. We read professional blogs, hobby blogs, news blogs, and our Facebook pages. We get all this information from our desktop, laptop, iPod, iPad, Kindle, Droid, Blackberry, etc. That is information overload!

Recently, the ITRTs attended the VSTE Conference, (VA Society for Tech. in Ed.), in Hampton. One of the sessions that I attended was all about using the right tools to avoid information overload by Tim Stahmer.

Too much information has been a problem since Gutenberg’s Printing Press got started in the 1400’s. As professionals, we can organize ourselves one tool at a time and let the term “TMI” roll right off our backs.

My first suggestion would be to Keep it Simple and Straightforward (KISS). Think about Marzano’s instructional strategy of using advanced organizers to help us sort or organize information. We can use the same organizational concept ourselves that we use with our students. In this case, the organizing tool is Google Reader. Google Reader will aggregate all of the information we like to read about online and put it in one spot for us to read when we are ready.

RSS Feeds and Google Reader

You might have seen the RSS icon in your web browser or web page and not realized what it was before now.

Tim Stahmer sums up RSS feeds easily when he explains that email is known as a “push” technology and RSS feeds are known as “pull” technology.

Using RSS

When you open an aggregator, it goes out to each of the sites you have in your list and pulls in the new information found on the RSS page. It then makes everything in all the feeds you’ve selected available to you in one place.

Think about it this way. RSS is like email in that both bring lots of information into one place making it easy for you to read and process.

Email, however, is a “push” technology. You have no control over who sends a message and when it’s sent. Someone else pushes information to you.

RSS, on the other hand, is a “pull” technology. You decide the source of the information and when you want to receive it. You are in control. And, since you choose the sources, there’s no spam.

Can't access YouTube at school? Click here for the CommonCraft Video: RSS in Plain English.

As always, contact your ITRT if you need help getting started. This is a great first step to get organized and in control of the information you consume!