Table Of Content

By Chris Bigenho Mining for Gold I magine starting your day with a you also have placed this course cup of coffee while you browse an feed in your school’s LMS. electronic copy of The Daily Me— As a director of educational all the blogs, wikis, podcasts, social technology and as a national networks, social bookmarking sites, speaker, I am often asked how newspaper articles, and television and I keep up with all the changes radio programs that you find interest- and advances in ed tech. I wish I ing without all of the “other stuff” could say that I am able to process getting in the way. vast amounts of information on It’s all possible, thanks to RSS (Real the fly. The truth is that RSS allows Simple Syndication or Rich Site Sum- me to pull together rapidly chang- mary), which allows Internet users to ing and mounting information. I control the information they receive encourage you to stay with me as I through subscriptions. A program introduce you to the world of RSS, known as an aggregator collects new one of the least used and understood information posted on the Internet. of all the Web 2.0 tools. Users can then visit a single page to view all the new information in their What is RSS? Vista have integrated aggregators, aggregators. RSS technology has two parts: feeds and most browsers now have op- If you’re a political junkie, for ex- and aggregators. RSS feeds use a spe- tions for feed readers. I prefer to use ample, you may want to subscribe to cial type of HTML known as XML. Internet-hosted readers because you both conservative and liberal blogs, Each feed is defined with channel tags, can reach your feeds from any com- commentary sites, and mainstream which contain specific information puter connected to the Internet rather media pages. Suppose you are also a that defines individual items. Aggre- than being limited to access from history teacher and this week the class gators read these special tags, track your personal computer. Some of the topic is domestic politics related to the each subscribed page, and notify you more popular Internet-hosted readers Middle East. You simply adjust your when new items are added. are Bloglines, Netvibes, iGoogle, and feeds to pull information on Middle You can find RSS feeds on many In- Google Reader. East relations. At the end of the unit, ternet sites. News pages often denote a Client-based aggregators include you change your RSS subscriptions to feed with an orange icon showing the those integrated into operating sys- k hI s follow domestic health care. letters RSS or XML. These feeds are tems and browsers such as Safari for u l m/ As relevant items rise to the top organized by topic and region. In this Mac and Windows Live and Vista for o o.c of your reading list, you bookmark way, you can subscribe to topics such PC. Now that we’ve looked at how t o several articles for your students to as business news in Asia or religion in RSS works, let’s talk about some ways h p ck access through your school’s learning the Middle East. Feeds can also come you can use RSS in your classroom. o st management system (LMS) or Web from blogs, wikis, and podcasts. (See ©I h site. This way, your students can read Trying Out RSS on page 20.) Subscribe to student blogs. One of the rp the material before coming to class. RSS readers or aggregators are difficulties with student blogs is keep- e p u During class, students supply materi- divided into two classes: client side ing track of what students are writing. s e h als that add to the richness of your and Internet hosted. Recent Apple You can waste a lot of time checking t m/ o discussion. Because your students are operating systems as well as Microsoft the blogs each day to see if the stu- c o. also using RSS technology with social t o ph bookmarking sites, all of these re- By using Bloglines with the Bloglines Notifier, k oc sources are available in one place. And I receive notification every time one of my students posts a blog. t ©Is because you are a tech-savvy teacher, No more wasted trips to the blogosphere. Copyright © 2009, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), 1.800.336.5191 (U.S. & Canada) or 1.541.302.3777 (Int’l), [email protected], www.iste.org. All rights reserved. 18 Learning & Leading with Technology | March/April 2009 RSS Technologies Find the Nuggets for You dents have written. Or you can technology in a collaborative learning titled As the World Turns, a teacher use a feed aggregator and sub- environment. could use current news to drive the scribe to each student’s blog. direction and content of the course. Although any aggregator Feeding content to HTML pages.This Topics for the course could be divided will work, I prefer Bloglines is one of my favorites. You can find by geographic region: South America, because of its ability to run any feed online and create a JavaScript North America, Europe, Asia, East in the background with a that you can place on a Web page or Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Us- small program called a in your LMS. This script pulls the dy- ing feeds from multiple news sites from notifier. Bloglines Notifier namic content into the course. And these regions, I can pull them together tracks the blog subscrip- you don’t have to know code to pull as regional feeds and make them all tions, and an icon pops this off. You can build custom feeds available in one location on a Web page up on my screen when stu- using a tool called Feed2JS. (See or in the LMS. This makes it easy to dents post new content. Creating a Custom Feed below.) compare news as reported in and about Almost every blog engine I have used this technique to create different regions of the world. has the ability to share content custom feeds for teachers based on Now that you have been introduced through RSS subscriptions. I have my very specific information. In a course to the world of RSS, it is time to bring students set up a personal blog ac- count on Blogger and e-mail me the blog address. Blogger automatically Creating a Custom Feed creates the RSS feed. I simply paste the student’s blog URL in Bloglines Open the document where you want to build the feed. This can be a wiki page, a and click subscribe. By using Bloglines simple HTML page on the school site, or an HTML page in an LMS such as Moodle or Blackboard. Keep the page open. with the Bloglines Notifier, I receive notification every time one of my stu- Open your browser window and locate your desired feed. Copy the URL of your feed. dents posts a blog. No more wasted Open another browser tab or window and launch Feed2JS (http://feed2js.org). trips to the blogosphere. Click the Build tab. Subscribe to social bookmarks. Social Paste the URL of your feed in the line for the URL. bookmarking sites such as Delicious Select your desired options. allow you to keep all of your favorite I recommend these settings: Internet sites online. I use self-defined Show Channel = Yes tags to categorize entries. I create tags Number of Items to Display = 5 to 10 Show Description = 1 for each of my classes, and because Show Posting Date = Yes Delicious supports multiple tags, I Open Links in New Window = Yes assign topical tags as well. If I share You don’t need to worry about any other settings. this tagging structure with my stu- Click Generate JavaScript (right button). dents, they can also save resources to the “class tag,” which is then accessible Highlight and copy all of the code in the window. as a subscription. I create a subscrip- There should be about 10 lines of code. tion out of the class tag and add the Navigate to your LMS course. RSS feed to one of my aggregators and A link to the open page should be at the bottom of your window. in my LMS. This way, all resources Paste the JavaScript code in this window where HTML formatting is allowed. that the class collects are available to Click Add to save changes. the entire class through one site. This has proven to be a fantastic use of RSS You should now see your feed. Copyright © 2009, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), 1.800.336.5191 (U.S. & Canada) or 1.541.302.3777 (Int’l), [email protected], www.iste.org. All rights reserved. March/April 2009 | Learning & Leading with Technology 19 Welcome to Trying Out RSS K12IMC.ORG You can dip your toe into the water of RSS by going to the ISTE home- page (www.iste.org) and clicking on the orange RSS icon next to the Over 2,100 news archive button. Or, if you already have a reader set up, paste carefully http://www.iste.org/AM/rssfeed.cfm into the subscription field. selected and annotated You can also subscribe to RSS feeds on the ISTE Ning, including resources content on the L&L group discussion board. Click on the RSS icon provide you or paste http://www.iste-community.org/group/landl/forum/topic/list? with the tools feed=yes&xn_auth=no into your reader’s subscription field. you need to and Resources for the K-12 community create exciting, For more information on using RSS in the topical lesson plans and classroom, check out the ISTE book RSS for curriculum. Like an Instructional Educators: Blogs, Newsfeeds, Podcasts, and Media Center in the real world, Wikis in the Classroom by John G. Hendron. you will find... • a solid foundation for Hendron’s book explains how to use a news supporting standards and aggregator to harness the power of RSS for assessment practices, a variety of purposes, including classroom projects, professional development, and keep- • classroom projects, lessons, ing students and parents informed. units, field trips, extended studies, and international The book is available at www.iste.org/store. databases in almost every subject and across subjects, • references and projects to this powerful technology to your challenge your students, classroom. Explore the links in this Chris Bigenho is director of • ideas & resources to integrate article and set up your personal educational technology at the new media tools, copy of The Daily Me. Greenhill School in Addison, Texas. He is also an educational • tips for school, family, industry, Resources consultant and a national and community partnerships, speaker. He has his MA in Blogger: www.blogger.com • tools for planning, using and Bloglines: www.bloglines.com educational technology from managing your own Delicious: http://delicious.com Pepperdine University and is pursuing his PhD in environment, Feed2JS: http://feed2js.org educational computing and cognitive systems at Google Reader: www.google.com/reader the University of North Texas. • professional development and iGoogle: www.google.com/ig publishing opportunities. Netvibes: www.netvibes.com The K-12 Instructional Media Center is chockfull of the best-of- What’s Everyone breed resources for designing, implementing, and refreshing Talking About? lesson plans and curriculum. Your One-Stop Resource Find out by joining For Curriculum And the L&L Group at the Professional Development. ISTE Community Ning. Used as a professional development resource by the Stanford School of Add your voice to Education and the Exploratorium, the conversation. K12IMC.org is a non-profit resource, maintained by Dr. Bonnie Tenenbaum. Check it out today! www.iste-community.org/group/landl http://www.k12imc.org/iste Copyright © 2009, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), 1.800.336.5191 (U.S. & Canada) or 1.541.302.3777 (Int’l), [email protected], www.iste.org. All rights reserved. 20 Learning & Leading with Technology | March/April 2009