The End of the Road

It seems that my academic semester has come to a close as quickly as it began 15 weeks ago, and it is time for me to conclude this blog on my future ELL classroom; however, that is not to say that this marks the end of my journey of research and study in the world of ESL. Rather, I have been inspired to further research outside countries, languages and classrooms to ’synthesize’ the best strategies to empower the best students.

My journey would not have been so eventful if it weren’t for the help of my RSS reader aggregate…thank you google reader! All of the articles I summarized, reflected upon or eluded to on my blog were direct results of my RSS. The RSS did the hard work for me. Instead of Googling each day for ESL articles and other goodies to feed my blog, I simply logged into my RSS once a week and took account of all the great articles it had sifted to find me.

Moreover, I have found myself telling all my friends to open an RSS account as well as a blog. The language of a blog is so different than academic writing, especially in a research format. When blogging, I feel that I can say whatever I want, however I want because it’s my page. Although I could probably write many posts about nothing and great a “cheese sandwich” blog, I found meaty articles to fill in the gaps and used my own, sometimes cynical, observations like spicy honey mustard. And lets face it, who has time to browse through millions of articles every day? No one. I’ll let my RSS deal with all the junk that floats through cyberspace and spend my precious time reading only the articles I chose.

Why? Because I can. I have found a great freedom with my RSS and my blog. The freedom to use my time wisely, the freedom to say what I want, and the freedom to become educated in a high-speed, super-cool, mom-friendly, not-yet-outdated way.