RSS or Rich Site Summary, also known as Really Simple Summary makes it easy to keep up with the blogs or news sites you enjoy reading. Once you have created an aggregator (a collection site for all of your sites) you simply have to input the sites you would like to subscribe to, and whenever those sites are updated they are automatically sent to your aggregator. This saves time, because now instead of going to each individual site, they are all in one place.
RSS: The Next Killer App for Education
This article, by Mary Harrsch, explains what an RSS feed is and gives four classroom examples of how to use it in the classroom. Her first example describes how we usually share information, by sending out mass e-mails to everyone we know. She suggests you post your findings in a blog that can be subscribed to by friends, family, and colleagues. Her second example is to subscribe to a newsfeed to get the most current information in your field. Her third example is to subscribe to all the school Web logs in you district to keep up to date on what is going on around the district. The last example is of a researcher blogging about an unknown artifact and posting a picture of it. An archeologist from halfway around the world then contacts the researcher with information about the artifact. Harrsch is also an RSS advocate e-mailing webmasters without XML links to ask them to add a link.
This article demonstrates 15 different ways to use RSS feeds for school use; teacher or student.
1. Share resources with colleagues or students
2. Syndicate your class blog
3. Keep an updated sports schedule
4. Subscribing to podcasts for current information
5. Monitor news and search engines for research
6. Use for professional development feeds
7. Job searches
8. Collaborative research
9. Create a search feed
10. Study guide feeds
11. Medical education-subscribe to medical podcasts
12. Monitor scholarships
13. Monitor funding and grant opportunities
14. Keeping up to date on school news by subscribing to school blogs
15. Staying up to date on financial aid news
RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators
This is a PDF that takes educators step by step through RSS, from set up to resources. It recommends using RSS feeds to keep track of students blogs, showing students how to use it for keeping track of research, and it describes how to use it for searches. It explains how to search for news, blogs, websites, and news groups. It then supplies you with interesting sites and more resources for learning about RSS.
This website is full of educational feeds that you can search and subscribe to. This website does not explain how to use RSS, in fact it doesn’t discuss RSS at all. I added this website to my collection as a resource for RSS feeds to search. Any number of these feeds could be useful to teachers. They range from college fairs to English, from blogs to journals, all very useful feeds.
This site once again defines RSS and how to use it, the application mentioned here that has not yet been mentioned is the iCalendar. One can keep up to date with any changes in the subscribed to iCal. This could be very useful for students and parents trying to keep up with individual class calendars.
RSS feeds are a great way to stay current with your favorite sites. I am already using mine regularly.
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