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School Library System Library 2.0 Tech Camp

RSS, Research Organizers, Subject Guides

RSS makes it possible for information from one web site to appear on another web site and for it to be updated whenever the original site is updated. This opens up all sorts of possiblities for re-using information and creating our own 'mix and match' web pages.

• Aggregate Information: bring lots of RSS feeds together in a feed reader like Bloglines or Google Reader. Scan lots of content quickly.
• Student Research Organizers: RSS feeds from newspapers, magazines, news sites, databases and other sites can help students keep up to date on their research topics. RSS does the fetching and students do the sorting, sifting and thinking!
• Subject Guides that update themselves: Use RSS from your del.icio.us account, news sources, magazines, etc. to create subject guides for students that don't need lots of updating.

Research Organizers

• Google Home Pages, Pageflakes (Teacher Edition) and Netvibes are services that let you customize your own space on the web.
• You can add all sorts of content from newspapers, blogs, magazines, video sites, photo sites, and many many more resources.
• Gather all your favorite content in one place, and when your favorite sites are updated, the newest content will appear on your personalized page.
• For students this can help them gather information for research projects. And you can observe what sort of material they're using and help them find appropriate material.
• These tools can also help students learn to organize and sort through content efficiently, helping them develop organizational skills.

Examples:

• Election 2008 Pagecast - A Pageflakes page with newsfeeds about the 2008 Presidential election.
• Darfur  - A pageflakes page created by Will Richardson. He talks about uses of these types of pages on his blog.
• Another Darfur page - this is a page based on Will Richardson's page, showing how easy it is to share and build on other's work. On this page, I've included an RSS feed of articles from an EBSCO database search. This brings great content out of the depths of our databases!
• Sample Student Page - Pageflakes has a sample student page with a class organizer, calendar, grade tracker, to do list and more.
• Student Organizer sample - this sample is a page I set up on Google's home page service.
• Journalism 2.0 - Resource page for a lesson on RSS and setting up feeds in Google Reader.

These research organizer examples are all based on the use of RSS to retrieve fresh content from selected resources and present it on a single page for easy review.

•  Nuts and Bolts #4 - Personalized Homepages in the Classroom  Great ideas on using iGoogle as a way to help students find and organize research information

• Use this video from Commoncraft.com to explain how RSS works

Feed Aggregators/Readers

Use a feed reader to consolidate all your blogs and news updates into one page. Great tool for students to help them organize and scan information.

• Bloglines - web based, free
• Google Reader  - web based, free

Create "Live" Subject Guides

Feed del.icio.us links to a wiki for a quick live subject guide. 

• Test on Wikispaces - (Biology) Wkispaces now has an "embed widget" option making it easy to add RSS feeds.
• Test on Wetpaint - Not as many RSS options as Wikispaces, though it's very easy to add an RSS feed directly.
• Test on PBwiki  - PBWiki test. Created with feed2js to create javascript to display headlines. Can't add RSS feeds directly.  Feed2js offers the most flexible formatting options.

For more on RSS:  RSS Resources (on this Wiki)

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