Chapter 5 Summary

Andrew Thonstad
Richardson, Will (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Chapter 5: RSS: The New Killer App for Educators

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and is an “aggregator” or informational feed collector that checks the feeds you subscribe to and collects all the new content from these sites. This process frees up your time. You no longer have to visit every site and blog to check on new content, the RSS collects it for you. You only have to visit one site to get all the new content.

Setting up an RSS feed reader is a fairly straightforward process. I used Google Reader (because of my Google email account). In Google reader, all you have to do is type in what you are looking for after selecting the “Add a Subscription” button. Adding RSS feeds is very easy from there. I agree with Mr. Richardson in that using folders to sort your feeds is very helpful and easy to navigate.

Mr. Richardson shares many ways that you can use RSS feeds in the classroom, including:
• RSS Feeds with Student Weblogs
o Use this for checking your students’ blogs by visiting one site instead of every student’s site.
• RSS Feeds without Student Weblogs
o Set up student accounts to track current events and research information.
• RSS Search Feeds
o RSS Feeds for News Searches
 This enables you to search from numerous news sources (Google has about 4,500 news sources to choose from).
o RSS Feeds for Weblog Searches
 This would offer some really great potential research information, just be wary as some results may be questionable.
o RSS Feeds for Website Searches
 By using this search you can search non-news sites for your information topic.
o RSS Feeds for News Group Searchers
 Set this up to search internet news groups.
o RSS Feeds for Other News Outlets
 Mr. Richardson suggests using Moreover.com and Syndic8.com to track more predefined topic searches.
o RSS Feeds for Bookmarks
 Use these for tracking what others are reading and bookmarking for future use.
• Vanity Feeds
o Mr. Richardson uses this title for setting up feeds of people that are blogging about you, your school, hometown, or anything that is fairly particular that you want to follow. I ran one with my last name and came up with news feeds and a couple of blogs in which my family members were talked about.

Once you have all these RSS feeds set up, you need to keep up on reading them. Set up a time to read them on a daily basis. I can agree with the few that I have set up. There have been a number of feeds and if I am not diligent about reading them, it could be very overwhelming.