After a very snowy week, the sun is shining and all the ice and snow is melting away. Happy Valentine's Day to everyone!
Will Richardson, in his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, notes how difficult it is to keep up with all the Web sites that change, sometimes daily and sometimes hourly! For example, Richardson says if you're a political science teacher and you've found twenty or thirty sites that are consistently publishing interesting and relevant information for you and your students, finding time to click through all the sites to keep up with the new information is nearly impossible. So, what if you could go to one place and read all the new content? That's exactly what an RSS feed allows.
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. In simple terms, Internet sites generate a behind-the-scenes code in a language similar to HTML called XML. This code, usually referred to as a "feed" makes it possible for readers to subscribe to the content that is being created without having to visit the site to get it. What you use is a piece of software called an "aggregator" or feed collector. The aggregator checks the feeds you subscribe to, usually every hour, and it collects the new content. When you're ready, you open up your aggregator to read the individual feeds, and decide whether to read the stories, file them to check later, or delete them. Basically, you are checking one site instead of twenty or thirty to keep up with all the content.
Richardson says there is a better reason to use RSS. Not only can students have the news and ideas of the day come directly to them, but they can also use RSS to let them know when someone has published something with certain keywords that they might be interested in. For example, using RSS, the student creates a feed for "global warming" that will bring new results as they are published right to their mailbox. Students can be immediately updated when new information about a particular research topic is published.
Richardson's advice to using RSS is to go slowly. To explore a list of aggregators you can choose from, go to http://newsonfeeds.com/faq/aggregators. Richardson, though, suggests the use of Google Reader because it's free and easy. If you already have a Google account, you can go to http://www.google.com/reader/ to access your reader account. If you click on Home, you can click on the link for the "getting started guide" to learn more about the use of Google Reader. If you know exactly what you are looking for, you can click on the "Add a subscription" link at the top left of the page and search for particular keywords. Once you get some subscriptions set up, all you have to do to keep up with the new content is to login to Google Reader and check your subscriptions on the left-hand side of the home page - if a name is bold with a number after it, that means there is new content available. To organize your feeds better, you can even create folders, i.e. "Education", "Technology", "World News", etc.
I hope you take a little time this week to look at Google Reader or one of the other available aggregators and set up an RSS feed. Enjoy exploring!
