Inoreader and Blogs to Follow

   As I read the reviews about Feed Readers, I was a bit overwhelmed with the many options and features that each website had to offer.  In order to make a decision about which Feed Reader to subscribe to, I had to really think about what my personal needs and wants were in using a program of this sort.  As I have started a new position as an Instructional Technology Specialist in my school district, I find myself coming across websites, blogs, and articles that I would like to read, but I may not have time right at that moment.  For this reason, I chose Inoreader for my Feed Reader.  Inoreader  allowed users to archive content for long periods of time.  This is appeleaing to me, because it give me a place to keep the things that I would like to revisit for future projects and ideas.
   I like that Feed Reader has a simple, clean interface that displays blog posts and websites visually with a picture and title.  This makes it easy to quickly scroll through the content and choose what you would like to read.  As I browsed and added blogs to my feed, they appeared in a list to the left, so if I want to take a look at content from that blog only, I can simply choose it in the list.  There is also and option to save webpages in the same program, and I added websites that I visit frequently, or would like to come back to.  Inoreader offers options for organizing feeds and articles that also made it appealing to me.  Users can create folders for organizing feeds, and tag specific articles to group them.  Inoreader is free to use if you don't mind the ads.  If ads are a problem, you can pay $14.99 for a subscription that provides reading without ads.  Overall, I think that Inoreader is a user friendly way to organize and access content in one spot.
   Here are a few blogs that I added to my Inoreader and Tumblr accounts to follow:

1.  edtech VISION
http://edtechvision.org/

This blog is devoted to using technology in education.  Not only does it include blog posts about ideas for incorporating technology with students, but it also offers menus of resources for open source tools and content, workshops and presentations offered by the blogger and useful links.  This blogger is a Google Certified Teacher with blog posts archived as far back as July of 2007.  I followed this blog because I am passionate about meeting students where they are comfortable by incorporating new and innovative technologies into lessons, and this blog offers ideas for doing this.

2. The Unquiet Librarian
https://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com/

This blog is unique in that the blogger is not only a librarian, but a current writing teacher as well. This provides interesting perspective because this librarian is not removed from the classroom.  She blogs about current projects that she is doing with her students as well as ideas that she incorporates in her library.  The posts are archived as far back as 2007.  There are also menus and links for a lot of other useful content.  There are two dropdown menus for searching posts: Categories and Archives. This makes it simple to go to a particular year or topic of particular posts.  Included on the blog is a sidebar from Goodreads of featured books.  The blogger also includes a list of links to blogs that she finds useful herself.  I followed this blog because I find the perspective of a librarian who is still in the classroom particularly applicable because as a librarian it is important to be able to help teachers as much as possible.

3. Mighty Little Librarian
http://www.mightylittlelibrarian.com/

This blog offers posts about a wide variety of library related topics with some fresh and trendy ideas. My attention was initially caught by the most recent post, an advertisement for a free webinar.  Upon closer reading, I found that this webinar is offered with various content each month.  The blogger has also recently posted about new apps that she has recently presented on, the design of her circulation desk, and content based shelving.  I followed this blog because I am intrigued by the wide variety of content offerings and ideas provided by the blogger.


4.  YA Book Reviews and More
http://naomibates.blogspot.com/

With a visit to this blog, the reader is immediately greeted with links to many useful resources for teachers, librarians and students.  The blogger provides many links to Creative Commons resources available, tools for presentations, technology tools as well as a library of slide presentations that she has created over a wide variety of topics that are available for download.  I found the first post particularly intriguing as an aspiring librarian because it is not just a typical book review.  The blogger went with a seasonal approach and reviewed thriller novels for the Halloween season.  Not only did she include pictures of the book covers with a brief summary of the book, but she also included a link to the book trailer and movie pairing, if available.  This makes these review particularly appealing to students, because they enjoy watching the trailers and movies.  This blog is richly devoted to book reviews, but also provides useful posts of resources for readers.  I followed this blog to have access to all of the resources and book reviews.

5.  Lake Forest High School Library
http://lfhslibrary.tumblr.com/

The Lake Forest High School librarian uses this Tumblr account as a way to promote the library and share a variety of information with it's patrons.  There are posts of simple pictures and Memes that are fun and inviting, feature posts such as highlights of teachers on campus and their favorite books, a top ten list of books read on the campus, and images showcasing book displays and things going on in the library.  The Tumblr is also linked to the library's Twitter account, so the librarian's Tweets show up in a sidebar on the page.  I followed this blog because there are a lot of good ideas that I might like to use as a librarian, and I like it as a model of kinds of things to post in a blog.

Here is a link to my new Tumblr: http://ambermstowers.tumblr.com/



Resource:
V. C. (2015, September 22). The 10 Best Feed Reader Apps for RSS, News, and More. Retrieved              October 9, 2016, from https://zapier.com/blog/best-rss-feed-reader-apps/