Really Simple Simplification (RSS) has been described as the "new killer app for educators" (Richardson pg. 71). The way it works is truly ingenious. The old method of reading online would generally entail one flipping from webpage to webpage or blog to blog opening up innumerable pages on your computer. By using the RSS feature, the information simply comes to the person rather than the other way around. People may subscribe to blogs, newspaper sections, online journals, or any other informational source of interest. You would then simply check your reader, I use Google Reader, on a regular basis to update yourself on the information and material out there. Once you have acquired a vehicle to begin collecting RSS feeds your "inbox" sill look something like the image below. As you can see, feeds can be subdivided into categories or topics.
Here is a PDF I found on the web on
using RSS feeds in the classroom which provides a pretty simple overview and some straightforward instructions on getting started. The directions are so simple that even I could follow and understand them. Now let's say, for example, that you want to receive feeds from the publication
Education Week on topics of specific interest. You could access the list of RSS feeds available on the journal by clicking the previous hyperlink and then select by topic or grade level which feeds you wished. Updates would then be delivered to the reader tool which you could review and link to. I have just recently become familiar with this tool and must confess that it has saved me a lot of time. To quote Ferris Bueller, "Should you have the means, I would highly recommend acquiring one."
I agree, this really is a huge time saver. I have all the blogs I follow sorted in my Google Reader into subheadings to make it easier to keep up with everything. In a classroom setting I might encourage students to sort feeds they follow for a certain project into one category, feeds on other topics into separate categories.
ReplyDeleteIt never occured to me crossing Google Reader into a use for collecting student blogs. The fact that if I had my students create and post to a blog weeekly, it would definitely save time having my students blogs sent to my reader instead of me having to sort through each and every one.
ReplyDeleteI think it ate my kudos post last week, but regardless, nice links and I agree with the time saving! I wasn't a blogger or subscriber before, but both are growing on me! And it seems you shouldn't be doing one without the other!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Paul, for this excellent post. We need to show everyone in class all the resources available from Education Week. I just subscribed to two more feeds from Education Week thanks to your link. Do you mind discussing both the links you have in this post at our next class? Thanks. By the way, yes, subscribing to students' blogs is very helpful. With 51 students blogging this semester, I have a folder in Google Reader for keeping all the blogs for EDUC 584 spring 2013. I just open that folder and can see all the incoming posts.
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