Journal #7

Bigenho, C (2009). Mining for gold RSS technologies find the nuggets for you. Learning & Leading with Technology, Retrieved 03,24,09, from http://www.learningandleading-digital.com/learning_leading/200904/

Bigenho starts off his article tempting us with the thought of being able to sit down with a daily cup of coffee and read only the stuff that we want to read from the latest blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks, newspaper articles and radio stations without having the sift through all the junk. He then tells us that because of RSS (Real Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary), it's all possible. Basically all a person needs to do is subscribe to an aggregator that collects information from the Internet and allows the person to see all the information by going to a single page.

As an educator you can have students access the information you want them through your school's learning management system (LMS) or Web site. This way students can read information before coming to class and be prepared to add interest and depth to a classroom discussion. Although RSS is one of the least used and understood Web 2.0 tools it is an invaluable tool for educators to stay up to speed with the everchanging technological climate.

So, how does RSS work? There are two parts to RSS technology, the first are the feeds and the second are the aggregators. RSS feeds uses XML, a special type of HTML and is defined with tags that contain specific information. RSS aggregators find these special tags, track pages based on your subscription and lets you know when new information is added. RSS feeds are typically identified by an orange icon with the letters RSS or XML. RSS feeds are organized by topic and region, so if you wanted to find out more info for a particular topic in a specific region you can. RSS aggregators are separated into two types, client side and Internet hosted. Internet hosted readers will allow access to your feeds from any computer connected to the Internet whereas, client side limits access to your personal computer. Some examples of Internet hosted readers are Bloglines, Netvibes, iGoogle, and Google Reader.

One way that RSS is useful in the classroom, is that it can allow you to monitor student blogs without having to check each students blogs daily to see what they've written since the last time you checked. The way to monitor them more efficiently would be to have each student set up their own personal blog on Blogger and e-mail you the blog address. Blogger sets up the RSS feed and you paste the student's blog URL into Bloglines and hit subscribe. When you use Bloglines Notifier with Bloglines, you will be notified whenever a students adds a new post to their blog.

Another way that RSS is helpful in the classroom, is by using social bookmarking, like Delicious. This is a way to organize all of your favorite Internet sites and organize them by using multiple tags that will help bring them up when desired. Students can have access and contribute to Delicious which creates a very collaborative learning environment.

You can also use RSS to create a JavaScript that you can put on your LMS or Web page. This allows you to enhance your curriculum without have to know special code, just create a custom feed, by using Feed2Js.

As you can see there are several ways to introduce RSS to your classroom. It is a great way to enhance the learning experience for your students.

Question #1 - What are some of the confusing aspects of RSS? I'm still confused on the actual process for using RSS. I get the overall concept and what a great collaborative tool it is. I'm also not sure how I would use it in an elementary school setting. I would need to do further looking to find some age appropriate ways to use in an elementary classroom.

Question #2 -Why are the benefits of using RSS in a classroom? It helps save time if your students have blogs, because if tells you when there are new posts as opposed to you having to check the blogs to see if there are new posts. It fosters a collaborative learning environment for both teachers and students. Students have access to information and resources that the teacher finds important to the curriculum, then students add their own gems, therefore both teachers and students learn from each other.