Kneel at the robes of ‘The Edublogger’

How I Use RSS To Make My Life Easier | The Edublogger

I’m really into RSS — a RSS power user may be an appropriate title since I grab every RSS opportunity to make my life easier and maximise my ability to interact effectively with others.

This is where it’s at. In fact I would go further than The Edublogger and say that if it doesn’t have RSS I am not interested. You don’t have to become an RSS ninja but if you work on some basic moves it can allow you to keep track of things that you thought wasn’t possible. The power of digital content for me as a teacher is in the filtering and retrieval of the information. Can I search it quickly to find what I want? If you have RSS feeds for each class showing wiki and blog contributions (posts, comments, edits etc) that you can filter by name, sort by keyword or even embed somewhere else (and have it update automatically) gathering “evidence of learning” is not such big deal. You just have to get the tasks right. But that’s another post. Probably a series.
Invest some time, learn some “RSS kung-fu”. You won’t regret it.

Working the feed

Taking my own advice from last time we’re going to slow things down tomorrow afternoon. Plan is to revise RSS, blogs and wikis with people using some of the stuff I’m doing at the moment as an example. People will be viewing this post and adding the blog feed to their RSS reader (most likely IE7)

Atomic Learning has a tutorial showing how to add a feed to the feedreader embedded in IE7 called “Using RSS feeds” You’ll need your login details (email me if you don’t know what they are)

I might create a public wiki for people to have a look at, get the feel for what’s going on. Provide room for experimentation maybe and provide an opportunity for everyone to wrap their heads around using RSS feeds to get updates of any website they happen to be attached to.