RSS Feeds to gather news and information

 

Introduction What is RSS? Why use RSS? Examples Setting up Feeds Managing Feeds Applications in K-12 Learning

 

Introduction

 

What is RSS?

Definitions of RSS feeds on the Web:

• Really Simple Syndication is a popular technology for notifying users of updates to content in a website, blog, or Internet TV channel.
  • http://studio.brightcove.com/library/help/glossary_help.cfm
• RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.
  • http://wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_Feed
• RSS in Plain English
  • http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

 

Why use RSS?

Coveniently access, in one location, News, blogs, podcasts or any other web pages that change frequently. "Receiving RSS feeds via a blog reader has helped me to keep up with the ways technology is being used in education and has helped me to grow professionally". - Davinna Artibey

 

 

Examples

All Online RSS readers require the creation of an account.

 

Bloglines - http://www.bloglines.com/

Netvibes - http://www.netvibes.com/

My Yahoo - http://cm.my.yahoo.com/

Google Reader - http://www.google.com/reader/

 

 

Setting up Feeds

1. Create an account (free) on a blog reader (I'll use Google Reader as an example)
2. Click on "Add subscription"
3. In another window, open up a blog to which you want to subscribe. Here are a few I (Davinna) value:

• Never Ending Search by Joyce Valenza "A discussion of information fluency, teaching, and learning in the 21st century."
• Digital Reshift by Christopher Harris "Technology trends and information for school libraries."
• Librarian in Black by Sarah Houghton-Jan "resources and discussions for the 'tech-librarians-by-default' among us"

1. Copy and paste the URL of the blog in to the Google Reader "-Add subscription" box

• Note: some blogs and feeds will have an orange button that you need to click on in order to get the feed URL.

1. Click the "Add" button

 

Managing Feeds

• Tip: I have found that feeds are much easier to keep up with now that I've made iGoogle my home page with my Google Reader on it.
• Only subscribe to blogs that are meaningful to you.

 

Applications in K-12 Learning

• Davinna taught students preparing for a current events competition how to set up blog readers to receive international news feeds.
• Students can get RSS feeds on a specific news topic, such as climate change. Source: RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators
• If a teacher is having students write blogs, the teacher can have all of the blogs come to him/her with a blog reader, instead of going to all thirty blog sites. ( Will Richardson, author of web-logged, saves a lot of time and keeps all of his classes paperless this way) Source: RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators

 

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