Why is RSS important for the classroom?

In Blogging4Educators week three, we are discussing RSS and tagging. So far, a lot of the reflections on the use of RSS have focused on using a feed reader to keep current on updates to students' blogs.

After reading "The Technology of Reading and Writing in a Digital Space: Why RSS is Crucial for a Blogging Classroom" by David Parry, I realized that using RSS in the above-mentioned way allows students to become better writers. According to Parry, when students know their work is being read by not only the teacher, but also their classmates, and when they understand that their writing is linked and connected to other articles online, a new form of "authorship" emerges. I think that when student bloggers realize that others are subscribed to their blog feeds, then they have an audience in mind when they're writing; in turn, the student bloggers realize the responsibility they have for providing links and accurate information for those readers.

However, one concept about RSS that I found even more interesting was the section of Parry's article called "Why it [RSS] Matters for Student Writing". I found myself identifying with the following quote:

The amount of information on the web is overwhelming to say the least. I could spend the rest of my life reading Wikipedia and would probably never finish. While this is also true of a large library (say here at the University at Albany) as well, the tools one uses to navigate the library, a static electronic database easily searchable by author, title, or book, is clearly inadequate for the web.

How many times have teachers assigned research projects on topics which there are plenty of print and online sources, only to hear that students are having trouble locating sources? It isn't that a lack of sources on the topic exist, but it just may be that students become overwhelmed by the volume of information available to them online, and cannot identify the most important or relevant online sources. Parry explains how RSS can come to the rescue, and help students to develop their reading skills.

For example, if you were teaching a class on the Holocaust you could require that students subscribe to feeds that related to the recent trials of Holocaust deniers in Germany, and to the situation in Darfur. In this way students would get regular updates and could read the most relevant content without getting lost in a quagmire of information.

Parry's practical suggestion would be a great way to teach students how to identify the related online resources, to subscribe to their RSS feeds, and to evaluate the selected articles for relevance to their research. In this way, I can see how RSS could be useful for the blogging classroom, and the non-blogging classroom as well!

Using FeedBlendr to keep up with everything!

A Professional Development Quick Tip

When signing up for an EVO session, there are many sites to keep track of. For example, for Blogging for Educators, we have a Yahoo Group, two blogs, a wiki, bookmarks, Twitter, and so on! It seems like an impossible task to keep up with everything in one session, let alone two or more! Then, I came across FeedBlendr, which "lets you combine a bunch of feeds into one," according to their site.

I used FeedBlendr to create a feed for the online community of practice, Learning with Computers, and put it on my personal professional development Pageflakes. So far this has been a great way to keep track of "everything" related to LwC. I'm glad I perused Daf's del.icio.us bookmarks to find this great tip! Give it a try during EVO and see if it works for you too!

Related posts
Happy New Year (about joining this year's EVO sessions)
B4B Week Three Summary (a link to the live session held with Phil Hollows from Feedblitz during last year's Blogging for Beginners EVO session)

B4B Week Three Summary

Have I met the benchmarks for week three of Blogging for Beginners?

• Blogging: I've posted entries on Bilingual Babble, One Teacher's Journey, and Puppets in Action (Thanks, Monika, for inviting me to participate in your collaborative blog about puppets!). In the posts, I've tried to experiment a little with html tags, but nothing major. I've edited my profile to include a picture and have even been able to guide a few people through this process as well. In the coming weeks, I'd like to try out more html and play around with fonts, colors, etc.


• Comments: I've visited and commented on many of the blogs created for this session. I'm really amazed at the variety of topics covered and purposes for these blogs! And, some blogs include audio and video, so I'm eager to learn more about how to do these things too.


• Contribute to the group blog: I left a comment on blogging safely and the advantages of RSS in the classroom. Although I haven't blogged with students yet, I think that these are two areas that are really important to think about before starting, so I'm glad to have had this opportunity. At present, I think that opening up a blog written by adult students to the public has more advantages than disadvantages; sharing can be really motivating and rewarding in a number of ways. Then, as the article points out, using RSS has numerous advantages for both students and teachers. One thing I still need to do is explore Bloglines, Netvibes, and others more.


• Feedblitz session: Although I wasn't able to attend the live session with Phil Hollows from Feedblitz, I checked out his PowerPoint presentation and subscribed to the B4B blog with this service. When I received an e-mail from Feedblitz about a new post to the B4B blog, I was really impressed with the layout and both the text and images from the post were included.

I'm looking forward to week four where we'll learn more about blogging pedagogy!