By Chris Bigenho
Imagine starting your day with a
cup of coffee while you browse an
electronic copy of The Daily Me—
all the blogs, wikis, podcasts, social
networks, social bookmarking sites,
newspaper articles, and television and
radio programs that you find interesting without all of the “other stuff”
getting in the way.
It’s all possible, thanks to RSS (Real
Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary), which allows Internet users to
control the information they receive
through subscriptions. A program
known as an aggregator collects new
information posted on the Internet.
Users can then visit a single page to
view all the new information in their
aggregators.
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If you’re a political junkie, for example, you may want to subscribe to
both conservative and liberal blogs,
commentary sites, and mainstream
media pages. Suppose you are also a
history teacher and this week the class
topic is domestic politics related to the
Middle East. You simply adjust your
feeds to pull information on Middle
East relations. At the end of the unit,
you change your RSS subscriptions to
follow domestic health care.
As relevant items rise to the top
of your reading list, you bookmark
several articles for your students to
access through your school’s learning
management system (LMS) or Web
site. This way, your students can read
the material before coming to class.
During class, students supply materials that add to the richness of your
discussion. Because your students are
also using RSS technology with social
bookmarking sites, all of these resources are available in one place. And
because you are a tech-savvy teacher,
Mining for Gold
you also have placed this course
feed in your school’s LMS.
As a director of educational
technology and as a national
speaker, I am often asked how
I keep up with all the changes
and advances in ed tech. I wish I
could say that I am able to process
vast amounts of information on
the fly. The truth is that RSS allows
me to pull together rapidly changing and mounting information. I
encourage you to stay with me as I
introduce you to the world of RSS,
one of the least used and understood
of all the Web 2.0 tools.
What is RSS?
RSS technology has two parts: feeds
and aggregators. RSS feeds use a special type of HTML known as XML.
Each feed is defined with channel tags,
which contain specific information
that defines individual items. Aggregators read these special tags, track
each subscribed page, and notify you
when new items are added.
You can find RSS feeds on many Internet sites. News pages often denote a
feed with an orange icon showing the
letters RSS or XML. These feeds are
organized by topic and region. In this
way, you can subscribe to topics such
as business news in Asia or religion in
the Middle East. Feeds can also come
from blogs, wikis, and podcasts. (See
Trying Out RSS on page 20.)
RSS readers or aggregators are
divided into two classes: client side
and Internet hosted. Recent Apple
operating systems as well as Microsoft
Vista have integrated aggregators,
and most browsers now have options for feed readers. I prefer to use
Internet-hosted readers because you
can reach your feeds from any computer connected to the Internet rather
than being limited to access from
your personal computer. Some of the
more popular Internet-hosted readers
are Bloglines, Netvibes, iGoogle, and
Google Reader.
Client-based aggregators include
those integrated into operating systems and browsers such as Safari for
Mac and Windows Live and Vista for
PC. Now that we’ve looked at how
RSS works, let’s talk about some ways
you can use RSS in your classroom.
Subscribe to student blogs. One of the
difficulties with student blogs is keeping track of what students are writing.
You can waste a lot of time checking
the blogs each day to see if the stu-
By using Bloglines with the Bloglines Notifier,
I receive notification every time one of my students posts a blog.
No more wasted trips to the blogosphere.
