I don't go looking for hill, but when I come to one, I run it. - Jack Mahurin

This week’s focus of RSS Feeds and blog aggregators was definitely a tough uphill learning experience which required slow step-by-step direction. I relied heavily upon Will Richardson’s Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, stopping to practise each step on my computer through Google Reader, and then recording my learning for this blog before moving to the next section of the book and repeating the entire process. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before but I REALLY like Blogs, Wikis, etc. It’s written at just my level and breaks down the Web 2.0 applications into simple steps so I understand what I’m doing and am usually quite successful by following the instructions.

I now know that RSS means Real Simple Syndication. Richardson certainly feels strongly about the importance of RSS Feeds calling it “The Killer App for Educators” and commenting, “I think it’s the one technology that you should start using today, right, now this minute. And tomorrow, you should teach your students to use it.” (p.71) I’m sold, Will, this is just what I want to learn – technology that will make a difference for the students in my high school.

Richardson suggested setting up a feed aggregator through Google Reader. Fortunately I’d already set up my Google Reader account when we established our blogs in September and so I already was receiving the RSS feeds for a number of subscriptions. Richardson suggests no more than 10 feeds and to get into the habit of checking daily. Oops! I have less than 10 but I haven’t been able to read them regularly. This information overload stuff reminds me of the 200+ emails I was dealing with not long ago. But I managed to clean the emails up so here goes…

I read some of the RSS feeds I’d been neglecting - I had 81 to read! Some examples of incoming goodies:

• From the CommonCraft feed I watched Google Reader in Plain English which was just perfect as I’d forgotten how to subscribe and so it was a timely little review.
• Caught up with several blogs I’ve been following and posted comments to the authors.
• Read the latest on Graphic Novel reviews from School Library Journal.
• Listened. to part of a podcast of The Loop from Nike site interview with elite runner Alan Webb. Neat that podcasts can be directed also through feeds.
• Read a Joyce Valenza article about the Wikipedia Encyclopedia for use in schools and forwarded it to my teacher librarian colleagues in an email.

At this point I have a lot of questions. As I skim through the feeds that have come in some have potential, some aren’t interesting and some I’d like to read more carefully later. Also once you’ve skimmed through the list (love the way the counter dropped down from 81 as I scrolled through) then can you ever retrieve these articles again? How do I organize these sites and articles? How do I keep them for later retrieval? How do I add more feeds and get rid of the boring ones?

On page 75, sure enough, Richardson explains how to remove and add subscriptions so I tested this on 24 hours in Pictures which was on my list. Although each day brought great photos, I have no time to look at them so I practised by removing this subscription using the feed settings feature.

Next, I tried the add subscription button to look for information about Watchmen, which was the topic of my comic-to-film wiki project for my Graphics Novel course. I am keen to keep up with what is happening with the movie and the upcoming court case regarding its release so I added it to my list. A whole list of possible feeds came up and so I followed Richardson’s advice to check them out first before subscribing. I skimmed the URLs and opened several sites until I came up with the best one for my purposes – the official Warner Brothers Watchmen site. This site releases a monthly video journal about the movie so now these will come in automatically without me having to remember and then search for them. I love the idea that using Google Gears will allow me to save feeds with their complete articles, read them on my laptop at the cabin (no electricity) and then Gears will “synch up all of [my] actions” when I revisit my feeds.
Back to Richardson’s textbook, he goes on to describe what to do to organize the RSS feeds.
I went through some of the items in Richardson’s Weblogg-ed blog, which is in my subscription feeds, skimmed several articles and tagged them. They surfaced below my subscription list and were immediately retrieved when I clicked on them. When I edited the tags to consolidate items into one folder, the original titles wouldn’t disappear so I have to figure this out. I did star several feed articles to mark them as ones to read later on. This is like marking email as unread to gain your attention.

Back to the book, Richardson began to explore ways that teachers can use and promote RSS feeds with students. As a teacher librarian, I can see that I have my work cut out for me trying to pass this knowledge onto the students – in fact it seems almost overwhelming at this point. How do I start? With play and practice, of course, but then what? I take heart from reading a blog entry by the Webfooted Booklady whose entire blog seems to be a testimony to exploring one application after another. Her entry for November 14 tells about trying iMovie with a class even though she wasn’t that familiar with the program and learning together with the students. I have to let go of this assumption that one needs to be a total expert in order to share technology with others and to not worry about doing things perfectly.

Back to Google Readers, I tried the RSS Feeds for News Searches and after trying several topics and getting no results, I tried Vimy Ridge and received 213 hits for the dates I’d set. I recall trying to help students search for research information on homelessness in the Vancouver area and being frustrated with the lack of useful results from online searching and databases. This RSS feed is quite the thing! I could easily have found information for student’s queries using this method. Of course, the question of authority comes up because not all of these Vimy articles might be the best reference sources to use. Blogs can offer the benefit of different viewpoints but may voice more opinions than facts so students may need direction in this regard. Most of the feeds I received from my Vimy search were from Canadian newspapers and magazines. I did find several broadcasts such as one from CTV that could be played as a video. What a great option for students with learning difficulties. Also if the computer has a read-aloud feature then they could hear the highlighted text they have located through feeds, or rather, which the feeds have located for them.

I am amazed that the RSS feed will even search through Google websites with Googlealerts.com. I also had heard nothing about vanity feeds before and how you can figure out who is blogging about you. I wonder if this is how Will Richardson discovered several other course members and then made a response on their blog. Gee, I could be next!

Onto page 82…almost done…With all the amazing information coming in through a RSS aggregate it is important to have a way of bringing it altogether and sharing it with students and teachers. I really like the idea of collecting web information all in one place as a constantly updating source of information for students to use and also being able to do it outside one’s own personal reader, as Richardson suggests. However, I didn’t understand what Pageflakes was so I visited their home page and Wikipedia to discover that Pageflakes is a start page which can be organized into tabs to display different types of information. Looking at Richardson’s sample Pageflakes also helped and it would appear that Pageflakes is similiar to what I used to call a jump page created with lists of links. I’m quite excited about exploring Pageflakes and practicing setting up some samples for topics often covered in library research. I like the idea that the students can also contribute to the development of Pageflakes. I’m curious as to whether one sets up a Pageflake site for each subject or if they can all be organized in one place.

So, it looks like Richardson is correct that RSS feeds are a real “killer app” with a ton of application to educators. Not only can they help teachers become more organized and informed but also they have terrific potential for revolutionizing the way students research with feeds that deliver information directly to the researcher. Now I have some Pageflakes exploration homework to do and I also have to make it a habit to check my Google Reader on a daily basis. I think I’ll stick a post-it note on my computer.