I have known what an RSS feed is for several years but never thought about how useful they might be and how easy they are to set up. After reading Chapter 5, I set up a reader in my gmail account using 6 or 8 of my favorite news sites that offer feeds. I have found it very useful. Now, I do not have to check several sites for news, some of which may have been updated, others not. All I have to do now is open my reader and my news is there. This puts everything in one location and I only get updated information. What a time saver!
Obvious advantages for students are to gathering feeds to research topics, keeping tabs on your favorite blog(s), and, a feature I haven't tried out yet, setting up a feed for a web search (as newer search data comes in, you are fed the changes to your reader). The author describes how he uses feeds to monitor the work on his students blogs.
The only disadvantages I see are: 1) not all sites have RSS feeds and 2) if you add too many feeds, you can hit information overload very quickly (I started small).
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Sadly, I have always heard of people talking about RSS, but have never known what it was. (This is very embarrassing!) But, now that I have read chapter 5, I am very excited about setting one up for myself. It's going to be great for the news to come to me istead of me trying to find out the latest information by searching and searching the web. I can also see myself using this in my classroom several ways. One of the first ideas that I thought of was to choose a current NC event (since I teach fourth grade and we teach NC History) and have my student helpers set up an RSS to keep us updated on the current event. Maybe after a while, if the students were comfortable, let them set up their own RSS on the topics of their choice. This is a great way to reinforce reading skills. They could even blog about their findings or set up an RSS on one of their classmates blogs. I wish I would have investigated this earlier. One problem that I do see with this, and I agree with Jim, is that students could experience an overload of information very quickly. A mini lessson would have to be taught in order for students to learn how to "weed out" and only choose the most beneficial sites and information. I am very excited about trying this next year in my classroom. But I'm going to have to take Jim's advice and start small.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading this chapter, I realized how little I understand about the power of the web. I cannot believe how much information can be at your fingertips if you enable this tool. I've worked over several days and gotten my reader set up and actually found some feeds. At first, I searched for different feeds, but didn't find anything I'd really care about reading. I finally decided to read on to the next chapter, set up my Diigo bookmarks and started finding some feeds from there. I now find myself looking for the feed icon! I agree, with Jim though that you can get overwhelmed quickly!!
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