RSS Feeds

RSS, to me, is a so-so, ho-hum application. In other words I can take it or leave it. Currently, I have set-up feeds in the blog lines account and I get news via Yahoo alerts. Some days I have time to look at these and some days I don't. Of course, according to Will, we all should take one to two weeks to look over everything in his chapter and slowly learn about RSS as we use it. For me, this translates to a better chance of appreciating RSS and possibly incurring a little more enthusiasm along the way, but then again only time will tell.

Currently though, despite my non enthusiasm, I have to say I do see plenty of uses for them.

One in particular would have to be as a research tool for students. Any topic that a student choses to work on will have plenty of up-to-date information that can be used for their research papers.

Another use, would have to be as a way of keeping students in touch with each other. When students are working on blogs (like our class), they can link them all into one feed and read any new content that comes through by accessing the feed. They are able to make comments to any of the blog posts that they want, without having to navigate from blog page to blog page.

A third use, would have to be for background for literature, short stories, poems, and other texts that are explored in the ELA classroom. Students can create a book list feed and use it to discover information about books they like, don't like, haven't read, or would like to read. They can also use it to write book reviews at various websites in response to what they have learned.