Wow! What a warm and hospitable dawn for Intrepid Teacher: Fifty-two visitors, fifteen comments and already seventeen Twitter followers. It feels like I am off to an auspicious start. I have added a brief bio in the About Me tab to answer a few basic questions, but now it is time to get to work.

Before I start let me say that I feel like I am in sandwiched in an odd position. On the one hand, I have been thrown into a whirlwind of online activity thanks to my friends at Twitter and forced in a way to keep my head above water and learn new cyber tricks, while on the other hand I feel that I am pulling along some readers at my school who may not even be unfamiliar with such simple things as Google Reader and other Feed Aggregators. Don’t get me wrong, I relish this position of being in between the experts and the novices, because that is really how I feel about technology in the classroom. I am not the computer teacher; I do not know how all of these tools function, but I do have the desire to learn about and subsequently teach the topics I discover, and that thirst for understanding, in my opinion, is a strong and motivating inspiration to others.

There must always be a bridge between people who posses knowledge and those seeking it. That bridge is the teacher. So my posts may seem over some readers’ heads, while they may appear pedantic to others. The outcome I am striving for is that we connect these two worlds and allow people to get involved in conversations that will help them better understand the topics they find the most relevant.

So! Where to start? I am hoping that you are a teacher at my school who is interested in what I have to say here. Or maybe you are just discovering blogs and you now have a few blogs that you like to read. Perhaps there are a few educational blogs that have caught your eye, or maybe there is someone writing a blog about indoor gardening or vegetarian cooking; whatever your interests, you will soon find that there are millions of people writing millions of blogs about whatever you may be interested in, but how can you keep track of all of these blogs. You do not want to have to check each blog to see if your favorite writers have added any material. You want a place that informs you every time your favorite blogs have been updated and will store them for you to read at your convenience.

That is where RSS feeders and Google Reader come in. Again, I am no expert on which of these various tools is best or even what the differences are; I can only recommend and show you how to use the tool that works for me. Perhaps someone will leave a comment recommending a better approach.

Here is how to set-up and use a Google Reader account to help you sort out and stay updated to your favorite blogs. Feel free to start by adding Intrepid Teacher to your new reader account!

1. Start by clicking here or typing in Google Reader into Google. (Note: if you have a Gmail account or another Google service like Google Maps or Google Video you already have access to this service. If you do not have a Google Account, get one! They come in very handy.)

2. Enter your email address and a password.

3. On the left hand side you will find a line that says Add Subscriptions. Simply click on this link and add the URL of the blog you would like to add. That’s it! Later you can organize your blogs and put them in categories and share posts with friends, but to start off with you now have a place where you can store all the blogs that interest you.

4. If that was too complicated you can always just watch this:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/0klgLsSxGsU" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Now that you have a reader account, you can simply click on this icon which you have probably seen on many news sites or blogs, and it will automatically add it to your account. Yes that is right! You can also add commercial and news sites as well. You can find these icons at the bottom of this page.

I hope that helps. Now that you know how to set up your own reader, you can subscribe to Intrepid Teacher so that you instantly know each time I have written a new post. More importantly you can begin to explore and collect your own blogs. Remember knowledge is no longer simply in the hands of the “experts.” We are all part of the global dissemination of ideas and information. Go out and find it. And when you are ready, you too can produce it!