RSS, Changing the Internet I

Why use RSS

As many of us have learnt, the internet is a great place to go for information and to learn about anything that may interest us. For example: the way I watch TV has changed, now when I am in front of the TV I have my iPad out and I look up the different character I’m watching, what characters are talking about and even products being advertised either within a show or commercials. 

Over the years I have been teaching, I learnt about a great deal of website that serve as superior resources for my lessons, my personal/professional development, and for suggestions of a variety of topics such as cars, cooking and random do it yourself project for around the house stuff.  For those of you who know me, I am not a “do it yourself kind of guy” however with these resources I have taken on many small project and managed not to hurt myself or my wife, yet! 

Only Social and Resource links

So needless to say I have tons of websites in my favorites which are organized according to topic/folders.  At first this was a great way of doing things. When I first starting to use folders to organize my favorite websites it was a gift sent to me from the heavens.  However, as I started collecting more and more favorites, that gift was taken away.  It became too hard to follow all these sites in my favorites, I couldn’t tell when they were being updated, and I couldn’t even tell which one was which any more. I needed a tool that could make my life easier, I needed a tool would check to see when the sites I was following we updated and then tell me about it, in essence I needed a site that would look out for me wave a flag and tell me, hey go check this site that adding something new and even tell me a short caption on what was added.  

RSS to the Stage

Enter the era of RSS.  Really Simple Syndication is a wonderful web 2.0 tool that does the work for the user.  In essence all a user needs to do it to download or setup an RSS reader and then the can either copy and paste a web address in to the reader or they can click on the RSS icon that is found somewhere of the site you want to follow (Duffy, 2010).  According to Duffy's research teachers want to keep stay current with the new developments in education, however they lack the necessary skills or time.  I believe that RSS is a simple enough program to use that will allow teachers the freedom of developing their skills in a time effective manner.  

If you are like me and you are addicted to you iPhone or IPad there is a really good (free) RSS reader called FeeddlerRSS and if you are a computer user you have a few options.  Personally on my computer I am using two different RSS readers: the first is found right in my Microsoft Outlook and the second is found in my Google account.  While all these readers are marvelous the ways I use them differ.  

FeeddlerRSS in Action

FeeddlerRSS is a fantastic tool that uses my existing Google account information and automatically retrieves the feeds I am following from Google and places them in the exact same order.  All I need to do is click on the feed I want to view from the left side of the screen and then on the right side I get entire collection of posts that have been added to the site.  More importantly than that, the posts that I haven’t read are numbered for me on the left side and on the right they are highlighted using a blue bullet and the title of the post.  So based on the title I can decided whether this is a post that I want to read or one that I will decide to ignore.  If I do decide to read it, all I need to do is click on the post on the right side and the reader immediately takes me to that site and the specific post.  After I am finished reading the post simply clicking the done button located at the top left corner takes me back to my RSS reader where I select the next article to read.     

                

Another great tool to use for following RSS is Microsoft’s Outlook.  This was the first tool that I used for following RSS and it is a little gem.  The reason I lived using this tool is because it utilized a familiar program that I used regularly, Outlook.  I was familiar with most of the options in the program and I was able to check my email which checking my RSS feeds at the same time.  Needless to say I still use the RSS reader in outlook when I am on my desktop, however the times are changing.  My desktop is no longer my primary tool for browsing the internet, working on my graduate studies or even working on my school work.  The more technology to develop and the more busy I get the more I am using mobile computing like iPad, IPhones and laptops.  With all these new technological mediums I needed one common account that can be used by all my devices where I wouldn’t have to add each of my feeds one at a time to each reader.