rss

What are RSS feeds? Well for starters, RSS stands for either Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication depending on who you talk to and it allows you to "subscribe" to websites for updated information. Below is a video that does a great job explaining what they are and how they work. http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

How could you use one or two of these in your classroom?

Here are two scenarios: 1.) Say you’re a social studies teacher and you've found 15 or 20 Weblog and media sites on the Internet that are consistently publishing interesting and relevant information for you and your students. Finding the time to click through to those sites and keep abreast of any new information on a regular basis would be nearly impossible. But what if you only had to go to one place to read all of the new content on all of those sites? Wouldn't be so difficult, would it? Well, that's exactly what RSS feeds allows you to do by using a type of software called an "aggregator" or feed collector. The aggregator checks the feeds you subscribe to, usually every hour, and it collects all the new content from those sites you are subscribed to. Then, when you’re ready, you open up your aggregator to read the individual stories, file them for later use, click through to the site itself, or delete them if they’re not relevant. In other words, you check one site instead of 30…not a bad tradeoff for a typically harried teacher. ---excerpt from http://static.hcrhs.k12.nj.us/

2.) Student Projects: In science class, my students have used Bubbleshare.com and its RSS syndication to share their individual digital storytelling projects with their classmates and parents (those that even have email addresses). Students use [|Bloglines] to aggregate their class projects. ---excerpt from Dave Coustan's blog at http://blogs.earthlink.net/

Other ideas: Go to a site for feeds for Word of the Day, Quote of the Day, Article of the Day, Today's Famous Birthday, or This Day in History at [|thefreedictionary.com.] If you are a librarian and you want to be notified when new young adult books are released, just add the [|Amazon.com-young adult books] feed to your aggregator. Get a feed from a bookmark on [|del.icio.us].