This will not be a particularly long post. I have been using RSS for about 3 years now. I used to use a Yahoo aggregator but now I use the Google aggrigator. It is great for my government class. News updates so fast and there are so many stories about issues so to choose 3 reliable news sources and two very extremist sources is awesome.
I would like to point out that itunes is in essence an aggregator. Every week it downloads the podcasts that I have subscriptions to and I can get them on any computer in the world. I draw the correlation that RSS is sort of like e-mail for your webpages.
If you are a user of Opera as a web browser (which I do) it sets up your home page as an indexed set of continuously updated pages. You choose your top 9 and they are at your click. Its a feature called speed dial. Take a looksy.
Now that I have extolled the virtues of RSS. My greatest frustration is getting others to use them. As you can see I love the RSS but my students are often playing the "dumb" on me. What I am happy about is that Moodle now has an RSS option (at least in 1.9 and beyond). That has some great opportunity for me and for helping set up info for the students.
Perhaps some project where they have to follow a "story" such as the lending crisis and by setting up an RSS to a news source, to Sound Money, to CATO Institute and to 1-3 other sources of their choice and put together the link between Economics and Government wouldn't be such a bad idea. If only to get the students to start using the feature.
If only I could get them to do something other than look at Myspace/Facebook, Youtube and World of Warcraft. ARgggg.
Well, thats it for the day on RSS. Check out the old Opera as a browser. Super great and virtually no malware are written to mess with it.
1 comment:
The 8th grade staff at Valley View set up instructions for students and parents to create a Netvibes account this year to pull the homework blog for each teacher into an aggregator.
Might be something for your team to consider.
I like the econ idea. As for the students spending more time on social networking sites, what about an econ lesson on how those sites make their money, or the evolution and Ethnography of Youtube? Michael Wesch has some interesting stuff about that.
Post a Comment