Chapter 5: RSS

This chapter discussed somthing that I have never even heard of before, RSS. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. A RSS makes it easy for readers to be constantly updates wth new information on a particular website or issue they are interested in. The example they used in the book that helped me understand this idea more was a political science teacher has 20 or 30 Weblog and media sites on the internet that they are really interested in and continually check on them. With an RSS, when these sites are updated, an aggregator will collect the new imformation to the websites that you subscribe to. This way you don't have to go searching for these updates all of the time. The easiest aggregator to sign up for according to the book is google reader. The book gives step by step directions on how to set up an aggregator, which I think is really useful. When you have an aggregator set up, you can then subscribe to RSS for weblogs or media that you use a lot. A teacher can use RSS feeds in the classroom by having all of the students' blogs be in them. This way the teacher doesn't have to go through each students blog to see if they updated any new posts. I think this is a great time saver. Teachers can also have their students create their own google reader accounts for things such as current events or new reasearch on a topic that the studnets are working on. I think that if I have older middle school students in my classroom, this will be beneficial to use. However I don't see how this would benefit younger elementary age students. If I do teach the younger age students I as the teacher will still use it to keep up to date on new ways to teach my students. There were many other tools that RSS can assist people with such as combining RSS feeds. You do this by going to RSSmix.com to reduce some of the work it would take to do this on your own. This chapter was very interesting, and I think this is a great resource that will save a lot of time!