RSS, Changing the Internet II

RSS for Education 

RSS is a great tool for teacher to use in order to stay current with the research and best practices. Technology in education is growing at an exponential rate and teachers need to stay current in order to best educate their students (Hendron, 2008).  Teachers can further their knowledge in a time effective manner by using RSS feeds to follow what the Gurus of the industry have to say.  For example, some of the people I am following are: Anne Davies (Assessment Guru), Daniel Mass (Technology Educator), Daniel Espejo (literacy Educator), Allan Gould (Apple Canada) and Richard Williamson (professor at U of T). By following their feeds instead of just randomly going to their sites and checking if they added anything new I am able to utilize my time and apply it accordingly.  A teacher’s time is extremely important because there is always something we need to do. RSS feeds allow teachers to use their time effectively by bringing the information to us as it is create.  

People I Follow

RSS feeds can also be setup for students.  I have not done this yet but this is something that I am going to try with my students (Hendron, 2008).  Right now I do have a couple of blogs setup for my classroom hosted on the Edmonton Catholic School District (ECSD) portal.  I checked with technical support and the ECSD portal does have the ability to create RSS syndication. I envision my students using their already created Google accounts and subscribing to our blogs RSS feeds and having the information come to them as it is created (Richardson, 2004).  I think this will be a lot easier for my students otherwise they will have to keep checking the site to see if there has been any updates or if there are any new important announcements.  Technology can be a burden on schools and educators if it is not used in an effective/efficient manner.  RSS feeds are one way educators can have can have technology work for them instead of the other way around (Richardson, 2004).  Richardson and Duffy share similar findings stating that educators are willing participants when it comes to furthering their knowledge if the right conditions are met. I feel that RSS feeds help provide these necessary conditions and more importantly allow educators to learn at their own pace. 

Personal use of RSS Feeds 

For personal use RSS feeds are great for keeping me organized and even useful around the house.  Instead of going to all the sites I have saved in my favorites and checking on what’s new, now I check my RSS aggregator and the information comes to me. If any of the sites I have saved post something new, I am immediately informed about it and can go check whether it is relevant to what I need or not.  I am following a lot of great feeds such as: Car and Driver, Gordon Ramsey, Wired Magazine, Holmes on Homes, 3 Minutes Fix it, Quick and Healthy Meal Planner and yes even Maxim Magazine.  To put it simply, my technological life has gotten a lot less cluttered since I started using RSS. 

Learning to Cook

References 

Duffy, P. (2006). The use of blogs, wikis and RSS in education: A conversation of possibilities. University of Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. In proceeding Online Learning and Teaching Conference 2006, pages pp.31-38, Brisbane.

Hendron, J. G. (2008). RSS for educators : blogs, newsfeeds, podcasts, and wikis in the classroom / John G. Hendron. Washington, DC: International Society for Technology in Education, c2008.

Richardson, W. (2004). Blogging AND RSS--The "What's It?" and "How To" of Powerful New Web Tools for Educators. Multimedia & Internet@Schools, 11(1), 10-13.

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.