The What and Why of RSS
What is RSS?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary depending on which definition you’re reading. It doesn’t matter really. What matters is that it works and it can really help educators keep up with the amount of information with which they are deluged each day. RSS works with software known as a newsreader or news aggregator. With a newsreader one subscribes to one’s favorite websites. Then instead of one manually going to check 15 different websites to see if there is anything new, the software does it for you. It brings the headlines and some of the story back to your computer. If you want to read more of the story, you just click and the story will load in your web browser. You can tell the software to get updates to your favorite websites each day, each hour, or as often as you like.
What Newsreader Should I Use?
There are too many choices to review here but I’ll mention two. First, Bloglines is a web-based newsreader. It’s great if you share a computer with others or want to be able to access your subscriptions at home, work, or when you travel. Another advantage is that you don’t have to install any software on your computer.
Second, is NetNewsWire Lite. It is a newsreader for Macs. It’s great, it’s free, and I use it all the time. There is a more fully featured version that costs $24.95 but I recommend starting with the Lite version and moving up from there.
RSS and Teaching
There are countless ways to use RSS in one’s teaching. As this is supposed to be a short explanation of RSS I won’t go into much detail. Will Richardson and Quentin D’Souza have written pdf’s which more fully explain RSS and give suggestions for using them in the classroom. I’ll just highlight two. First, RSS makes it easy to keep track of your students’ work online. If your students are posting to websites or blogs, you can subscribe to their sites. This eliminates the need to surf to each student’s page just to see if there’s anything new. The newsreader does it for you. It saves a lot of time.
Google News is a second way to use RSS. Google News lets you set up a search and then subscribe to the search. For example, let’s say you searched for news stories about earthquakes in Indonesia. You would find several news stories. You can create an RSS feed for that search, each time new stories are written that fit your criteria Google and your newsreader would be able to find them for you. That’s powerful!
The ways to use RSS in the classroom is only limited by one’s imagination. Will Richardson and Quentin D’Souza have written pdf’s that more fully explain RSS and give suggestions for using them in the classroom. Jump in and give it a try. Keep Will and Quentin’s pdf’s handy. I’ve been using RSS for a while yet each time I read their articles I find something new to try.
