Control the Flow with RSS
Alyssa Moskowitz, Amy Umberger, Darby Davis, Tiffany Walters
1. Post a link to your aggregator or post a screenshot of your aggregator
Alyssa
Amy
Darby
Tiffany
2. In 250 words or more reflect on the benefits and/or drawbacks of using RSS in the classroom.
1. How can RSS and RSS aggregators help you in the classroom?
For inquiry units, the teacher could find a bunch of related articles and create a topic in her feedly. This would enable the kids to use all of the resources that the teacher has already chosen.
2. How could/should students use RSS?
Students could use RSS to differentiate among classes. For example, they could create a math, science, social studies, English, etc category to store their resource websites for that particular class. Students can also save teacher recommended websites to their accounts that that they have access to them for any given computer.
3. Is this something you can see yourself using in the future? Why or why not?
Alyssa:
I could see myself using this in the future. I like how the advertisements and distracting stuff that normally shows up on websites is eliminated. It is also a place to see all of my regularly visited websites as once. I would encourage my students to use the site as well. I often need to re-direct my students to the same math resource sights over and over. If they create a math section in their RSS aggregator, then they would easily be able to refer back to my resource websites.
Amy:
I personally don’t see myself using this in the future. I found it very frustrating to use both of the sites – Netvibes and Feedly. Professionally, I think my website is a better way to communicate helpful websites to my students. Personally, I like my Yahoo! homepage, which was easier to edit and has all the websites I like to view, much like these RSS aggregator websites.
Darby:
I do not see myself using this again in the future, at least not while I live in Shanghai. When I tried to create a Netvibes account, I had problems so I quickly switched to Feedly. I was able to create an account, but I had to continuously switch my VPN off and on and it took almost an hour to add the 15 sites to follow. I am sure there are other types of RSS aggregator sites out there, but I'm not sure I would use them. I don't know enough about RSS yet, but it seems very similar to just saving your favorite websites in one location, like we did with Delicious.
Tiffany:
I can see myself using RSS feeds in the future. I like being able to save or bookmark things that I would be interested in reading all in one place. It makes it much easier than trying to have many windows or tabs open at the same time. I think I could also use it professionally to save different articles that pertain to my students’ inquiry units. That way, students can have all of their resources on one platform instead of having to search through many sites to find everything.