Saturday, January 26, 2008

RSS – It really is that “simple”

A growing obsession with RSS feeds has shown me a new ways to think about information retrieval. After reading Will Richardson’s “RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators” from www.weblogg-ed.com, I see some incredible possibilities. This document provided many suggestions to meet a variety of information needs of teachers and students. A step-by-step guide to set up an RSS feed, followed by classroom suggestions showed me how I can improve the research and information retrieval.

Richardson gives some great ideas for how RSS can be used:

- teachers can collect the work of their students who are maintaining weblogs through RSS (benefits: quick, easy to make comments, “paperless”, accessible to parents)
- students can create an RSS feed for specific information needs, such as a topic they might be researching, so that recently published news information about the topic is brought to the aggregator (you can select the news sources you want to follow, such as The New York Times)
- students can create an RSS feed to find Google websites on the internet regarding their topics. When information or new web sites become available on the topic, it shows up in the aggregator

Other interesting uses are explored. This guide is a “must-have” for any teacher wanting to learn more about RSS and its applications in the classroom.

2 comments:

Joanne said...

Hi Ronda,

Like you, I had no idea how easy RSS would be until I set up my own bloglines account. Previously, I had bookmarked all the blogs I was interested in and put all the bookmarks into a special folder in Firefox. Every day or two, I would go through my bookmarks, scan the blog, and read whatever was new. It was time consuming and I could only do it on my own computer. I read a posting by Stephen Abrams on his blog talking about bloglines and how convenient it was and signed up. What a great discovery! I love that I can access by blogs anywhere and I don't have to keep track of what's new or unread. You're right, it is really simple!

Elisa Orton said...

Hi Ronda,

Your right RSS has so many possibilities! I had never used an RSS before this course and am starting to find it very useful. I have changed my startup page to mine so that when I first go online I can check things out and not feel overwhelmed.

I look forward to utilizing this tool more and moe.