Overall, the plethora of emerging web 2.0 technologies promise to promote collaboration. RSS feeds, or Really Simple Syndication, not only play an important role in this respect, but also improve the overall experience of using the Internet itself.
Ever find yourself often navigating back to a website that you deem useful for any changes or new postings? Are you constantly seeking out news and other current information updates by navigating to several of your favorite pages and sifting through them to see what has changed or been added? If you said yes, then you probably are spending too much time at your computer looking for this information.
RSS feeds can help.
Most popular news websites and almost all blogs have the option to subscribe to an RSS feed of their content. The primary use of these RSS feeds is to make changes, updates, and new posts come to you instead of you having to search for them.
They are viewable in RSS readers such as Google’s reader, which allow you to view all of your trusted sites in one location. As updates occur, your reader will acquire them for you.
The other benefit to RSS is on the flip side if you author your own feed. This now enables you to broadcast or as the name implies, syndicate your own material and share it with the world as people subscribe and receive your posts. And did I mention that it doesn’t cost anything to be either the receiver or syndicator?
Excited about these RSS functions and capabilities, numerous educators and administrators around the country are recognizing the potential for improving their classrooms and school districts alike.
One example is using the feeds to help with professional development material. As Robert Kennedy writes in his article entitled RSS Feeds for Teachers, the feeds can be used to help teachers keep up with the “virtual avalanche” of information located on news websites, blogs etc… A teacher’s time is usually severely limited and therefore it is extremely difficult for them to keep current with new educational trends and technology, and most simply can’t. This often hinders progress.
As Byrne suggests, RSS feeds are a “great way to keep yourself current on developments in your content area” and can help save time.
Byrne goes on to provide another example of a popular use of RSS feeds in the classroom. He maintains that the research efforts of students can be improved by enabling them to track topics over a certain period of time using various subject feeds.
RSS feeds can also facilitate the sharing of student projects. As Blake mentions, his students have “used Bubbleshare.com and its RSS syndication to share their individual digital storytelling projects with their classmates and parents”. Opening up the possibility of students sharing their work with the world ultimately makes them more motivated to actually do the work. This same sharing of projects can also manifest itself in the form of a student homework page that teachers and parents can subscribe to. Richardson suggests that teachers who issue blogging assignments keep track of them by “subscribing to their students' feeds and simply checking their aggregators regularly”. This allows student work to appear in one easy to locate place for teachers to review. Of equal importance is students sharing their work with each other by subscribing to their classmates’ feeds.
Another way of using RSS feeds in education is to communicate school news and current events to parents. Instead of fielding phone calls about various topics or having to tell parents when to check in on the school’s webpage, parents can be pointed to a feed that they can subscribe to and hence always be “plugged in” to their schools’ content.
Another example for this type of use of RSS for communication is mentioned on a blog featuring the uses of RSS in the classroom. The author goes on to suggest using feeds to communicate things to students after the school day is over. Teachers can create an assignments feed as well as make mention of items that may have inadvertently been left out or not mentioned. Since the entire class would be subscribed, they would receive the assignments and missed content. This same blog also re-emphasizes many of the educational benefits aforementioned.
Want to know more and get some excellent integration ideas? Notepage Inc. provides an extensive list of ways that RSS can be used in an educational setting. Some topics mentioned are the sharing of resources, monitoring of research, study guides, search feeds, and collaboration.
Another invaluable resource to help get started with RSS is the Educational Feeds website that lists numerous educational RSS feeds separated into content categories.
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