The first thing we learned about in this chapter reading was what RSS stands for. That is Really Simple Syndication. This cool tool enables information content to come to your computer instead of you having to search for it everywhere. It is basically a consumer of information. They talked about setting up an RSS. One of the best tools out there to set up an RSS is Google Reader. This site is free to use and the author believes is one of the best out there.
Now when setting up your RSS you want to be careful of what sites you are looking at. They offered some hints of what to watch for. For good sites you want to make sure there are some advertisements, an author’s full name, and how often the site is updated. Also look for comments or well established conversations about the content of the site. They then went on to give us some hints on how to search properly and what to do when you become stuck.
The final pages talked about how to implement RSS into the classroom. The authors suggest using agitators and believe it will benefit immensely. They report that “Having a well-stocked, well-fed aggregator is like having a personal guide.” Some handy tools that RSS enables teachers to do are instead of reading through all your students web logs you can simply collect it in your agitator and read them together. Also the RSS feeds can be great sources of information for News Searches. Finally you can monitor your student’s feeds and see what information they are attaining. This chapter ended by telling future teachers that if you make an RSS you want to make sure and check it on a regular basis. IF you fail to do so you will find yourself with hundreds of feeds and a lot of work to do.
This reading really shows me the beginning of the impact that technology has on teaching, learning, and the world! I am just getting used to using a delicious account, a web log, and frankly a computer, and now there is a tool that collects all of this information because there is so much of it. I think that is just crazy. It really shows how much technology has grown, and how people are beginning to deal with the vast information that is out there. It is cool to see a tool that allows you to become a little more organized on the web, and also a little scary. This is just yet another tool that I will have to learn to use to keep up with technology.
As a future teacher I honestly will not do much different as a result of this new thinking. I have to decide if an RSS account is worth my time and effort. If it is, as usually I will be the first to jump on the band wagon and learn to use it. HOWEVER, if I can find a way to avoid this tool and do thing the old fashioned way I probably will try that for right now. I need to get used to the technology that I am working with now before I try to organize it.
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