Student Application:  What an amazing tool!  Go Google!  The education possibilities of google news feeds are endless!  I can see our history teachers assigning currents events in a whole new way.  Instead of surfing newspapers for an article that interests a student for a current events assignment, students can set up their own news feed on a topic related to their current studies in history.  For instance, a World Cultures course studying Africa can send students to Google news to set up a feed about an African country they want to study for current events and developments.  All of a sudden, the news is relevant, personal, and more exciting than ever.

Personal Feeds:  I set up a feed on the subject of teens.  While I was not surprised, I was saddened to find that most stories in the current news about teens are not positive.  Topics like car crashes, shootings, knifings, violence, obesity, and depression clutter the news listing for teens this past week.  The article that caught my eye the most, however, is “Kids Dis E-mail, My-Space Dominates and Cyber-Attacks Grow More Dangerous” because my own experience with teens at school is they do not see the Internet as a potentially dangerous space.  They think nothing of sharing their most intimiate secrets with a few billion online users.  And according to this article, Korean teens see email as a formal communication tool, designed for business.  Instead, teens in Korea are using a social networking technology, similar to Face Book, to communicate .  In fact, Koreans are ahead of the Japanese in the uptake of this new technology.  So, my question is where are American teens?  I venture to guess we are not too far behind (knowing how popular My Space has become), but is our current educational practices, curriculum, and instruction preparing the teens for this?  Is it something to fear as a parent and educator, or is it an exciting new development on the technology frontier?