RSS The trailer

I espouse the virtues of RSS constantly and I have alluded to how useful I think it can be for students and educators. Sue Waters then put the pressure on so I felt compelled to deliver. I see it as a trilogy, “RSS in three parts” (Quick! Reserve the movie rights!). Basic, intermediate and advanced. In each of the sections I will endeavour to include strategies, experiences or ideas as it applies to teaching and learning. Like backing up your data, therre is truckloads of stuff about RSS and it’s derivative services written by far brighter people than I but my hope is to tailor it somewhat to suit the audience and to save you some legwork. Here’s an outline of what to expect;

Ep1 A quick intro (Basic)

Quick introduction, reading your feeds and bookmarking your feeds

Ep2 Share the feed-love! (Intermediate)

Sharing your feeds – Friend feed, Google Reader
Embed in your site

Ep3 Work that feed baby! (Advanced)

Combine, filter, syndicate and other things you can do to “work your feeds”

That will do for a start anyways. Ep1 coming soon…

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.

You are subscribed

It was slow going to start with but everyone got there in the end. Subscribed to an RSS feed from a blog. Getting started is the hardest part but in my experience the most important. The whole RSS/social/sharing thing through the web is a difficult thing to wrap your head around especially at the beginning unless your in there doing it. Only through “getting a taste” can you start to figure out how powerful it can be and the different ways you might use it. Dealing with the “firehose of information” is what the students are faced with. They need these skills.
It’s a different way of thinking, a different approach. A challenge.
As “models for young learners” are we up to it, along with everything else?

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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.