And You Thought Only Kids Did The Reading...

Web 2.0 and Social Media information is easily available for teachers, administrators and other school leaders. Through blogs (like this one), Twitter, News sites, Wikis, and general websites, it can get a bit overwhelming if you try to sit down and sift through all the fluff to get to the good stuff. Thank goodness for RSS and RSS Readers.


What is RSS you ask?



In a nutshell, Really Simple Service, or RSS allows you to get instant updates when your favorite sites change. For example, this blog has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to. So instead of checking back here hour after hour and day after day, your reader will notify you when I have added a new post. Most sites offer the ability to subscribe, via RSS, so you can keep up.

Not sure if your favorite sites offer RSS? Look for this symbol:

So, now that you understand a little bit about what RSS is now you need a reader. A reader you ask? Yep, you need a place to organize all those feeds in one easy to view location. Kind of like an electronic newspaper, except you get to choose the content. There are several options out there, but one of the best is Google Reader. Here is a great video tutorial on setting up a Google Reader account.


Google Reader in Plain English from MJT on Vimeo.

So, you are armed with your Google Reader and a basic understanding of RSS and how to subscribe to feeds. What else is missing? Ah, feeds! You need some feeds to subscribe to. Check out this post I did on Educational Blogs you need to be reading. There is also a great collection of all types of Educational Blogs, organized by curriculum area and/or subject matter here. And here is another list of Education Blogs.

If you want to learn more you can check out the Online Learning course we have on RSS and Google Reader. Check out the Instructional Technology Calendar for more information.

So, go forth, subscribe away. Remember, it can be overwhelming at times. Learn from me. A few weeks ago my reader hit 1500 entries a day and I had to scale it back some. So, go slow. But do remember, check it each day and learn something new!

Image from Flickr Creative Commons

Pageflakes

Some time ago I moved from my utilitarian igoogle page to a new RSS startpage. When choosing a platform I'd wavered between pageflakes and netvibes sites - there seems to be little difference in the two. Both provide a sleek ajax-based page with options for adding a variety of embedded media and updated feeds.

After using each of the sites I'd hoped to offer a technology workshop on organizing webcontent with these start pages. I eventually chose pageflakes as the subject of the workshop, because I found pageflakes seemed to work a little better with our district's webfilter. There is also ateacher pageflakes site that makes it even easier to set up a page with education in mind.

I held the first workshop over spring break, and I really think pageflakes could play a role in helping teachers by providing content to help teach units. Teacher could use the site in the way I use the site - mostly to organize my RSS feeds from sites and blogs I check most frequently. But teachers might also create pages that contain content for their classes or even each separate unit they are teaching. Pages can be published, through pagecasting, which can allow the page to be accessible from any computer connected to the Internet. Teachers could use the pages during instruction, and students could access the sites and media the teacher chooses for a lesson.

Pretty great, and as is often the case with much of the new tech stuff I like, it's free and web-based so no installation is necessary.

picture from pageflakes.com

Track The Information You Want With Bloglines

Bloglines.com is a free news aggregator offered in 8 different languages. All you need is your email address and a password to sign-up. The site allows you subscribe and manage news feeds, web blogs and audio. It tracks information you want to hear or read about as it happens and puts it all on your customized web page. Bloglines collects syndicated feeds from tens of millions of online sources and makes it available to you in one location. All you do is put a check next to the feeds you want to add to your web page. You can receive your email newsletter subscriptions through a free blogline email account so it will not affect your current email. You can import your existing list of subscriptions (if they are in the OPML format). Blogline supports RSS 0.91, 1.0, 2.0 and Atom. You can create clippings which are articles (or sections) of a blog so that you can find them at a later date very easily. You can also create clip blogs. These are blogs that you create and share inside of blogline by simply clicking on the clip blog link. You can also track your friend’s blogs inside blogline.

Are Flakes for You?

Do you have password dementia – then Pageflakes is for you. While at the NCaect Conference I learned about Pageflakes. This website is among the growing popularity of websites using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), a group of inter-related web development techniques used for creating interactive personal publishing solutions. You can create your own homepage and access it without having to sign in. Pageflake is organized into tabs with each tab containing selected user content called flakes. Each Flake varies in content; information such as RSS/Atom feeds, Calendar, Notes, Web search, weather forecast, del.icio.us bookmarks, Flickr photos, social networking tools like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, email and user-created modules.