Thing 4: RSS and Newsreaders

RSS

In the video titled RSS in Plain English, the narrator warns, "Be careful!  This is a addicting!"

Oh, how right you were, Mr. Narrator.

Today, I worked on setting up a newsreader by subscribing to new feeds via RSS.  The purpose of  RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is to provide readers with news that is relevant to them in one spot. It's pretty simple: visit a website or blog that you like, find the RSS symbol, and click on it.  Once you click on the RSS symbol, it will take you to a page saying "Subscribe using..." and then you have a choice of Google reader, MyYahoo reader and a few others.

Though I would have liked to use Google, the Google reader will no longer be available as of July 1st.  Since I have a Yahoo email account, I decided to use My Yahoo reader. I like the Yahoo reader because I can create a tab for each different type of newsfeed to which I am subscribing.  For example, I read a lot of book blogs.  I subscribed to a few different blogs that I like to read and now, whenever the bloggers make new posts, it will go to my feed. Of course, after I did this, I spent quite a bit of time catching up on posts.   This is what I meant by addicting.  

This is what my Book Blog Feed looks like.  If you look, you can see the top tab labeled "Book Blogs."  These are updates from two of the blogs I like.   

I do think that teachers and librarians can use RSS readers to support learning . If you look at the image above, I have a tab called "Science and Stuff."  I visited a few science blogs and subscribed to their biology, medical science, chemistry feeds. Science teachers could ask students to set up up their own readers and subscribe to a few of these science blogs. Then, they could ask students to read over a few science happenings, maybe once a week, and write a few short summaries over these.

I will admit, I did not understand the purpose of RSS feeds at first, but now I am glad that I do!