Blogs, Podcasts, RSS, and Feed Readers
Posted by: cemat in Professional Development, Technology Resources, Web 2.0If you are a person who is really getting in to reading various blogs or listening to podcasts, it may be hard to keep up. Perhaps it is time to start looking at using the power of technology to send updates on all of those blogs and podcasts and whatnot to one place – an RSS feed reader. Here’s a quick description of RSS from Trey Martindale as written on his blog Teachable Moment -
Essentially, it is a new way to get information. It is an automated service that retrieves what you request, and then arranges the content so that you can peruse it at your leisure (and who doesn’t love leisurely perusing?). RSS is akin to having a cadre of personal librarians at your beck and call. And these librarians never tire from scampering around the Net, collecting all the news, updates, articles, search results, podcasts, multimedia, and other stuff you request. Here’s one more analogy–it’s like having your own completely personalized newspaper, brought to your doorstep daily (or hourly, for that matter).
RSS feed readers let you subscribe to RSS feeds from sites that you may frequent. Some RSS feed readers cost money and some are free. One popular, free RSS feed reader is Bloglines. If you are interested in setting up a free Bloglines account and subscribing to some RSS feeds, here’s a pdf handout from the 2006 MACUL conference and a Lenawee ISD Web 2.0 workshop to help you: Creating a Bloglines account and subscribing to an RSS feed
Here’s another resource from Will Richardson, who writes the blog Weblogg-ed the read/write web in the classroom, formerly with Hunterdon HS in NJ – RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators
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December 5th, 2006 at 9:46 pm
I was wondering if you were familiar with the Google Educator site. It’s relatively new. Their “My Google” page has a simple RSS feed reader. It’s easier than working with Yahoo, although IE7 allows for RSS feeds easier than IE6.
December 6th, 2006 at 10:20 am
Jon,
I recently became familiar with some of the Google Educator features as I was looking for resources for using Google Earth. This led me to some wonderful resources posted by educators for using the tool more effectively in the classroom.
I think it was only a matter of time until Google entered the “portal” status. I know your district has been using Yahoo for quite awhile, but you may also want to take a look at Gmail and some of the features available now through Google for having student email sites. There are going to be more and more resources available to educators as the “web 2.0″ keeps growing with sites for us to be interactive, more collaborative and productive. Thanks for pointing out the RSS features of My Google. Maybe some reading this will give it a try!
~Sue Summerford