I caught an interesting commentary from Clay Burrell on RSS in education – and got quite interested in the read for a while. I agree with Clay’s comments – to an extent. The thing is, there is more to RSS than mentioned here – but I’m thinking that it is outside the domain of teachers that we find the true power of RSS.
How about setting up an RSS feed on info topics, based on good selection of key terms, which are delivered directly from comprehensive journal databases, or scholarly internet resource collections, or searches that your have “rolled” yourself?? That’s ‘serious’ information gathering! RSS is not just for web info collection – that’s basic – and eventually pretty boring! Any wonder kids (and teachers for that matter) are not much interested. RSS also drives the work of students participating in the Horizon Project. Perhaps it’s the purpose for which the RSS is being used that makes it work. Check out Sue’s post on How I use RSS to Make My Life Easier – that’s an important message for teachers too!
I’m lucky – I can preach a different gospel of RSS coming from my library side, than I could coming just from my teacher side. There’s just more to learn about RSS – that’s all!
The good thing was that Clay told us about Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop service. As a fan of popurls my interest picked up again. What a great writing task set up by Clay. OK, time for me to dig deaper into the potential of Alltop.
Nah – no good! Well not for some of us anyway. Seemed to be a pretty slim representation of important education blogs. Even worse, I couldn’t find anything for education and library – either academic or school.
Good librarians are great Web 2.0 information professionals – and they are the ones who can show teachers like Clay how else to effectively use RSS and a host of other Web 2.0 tools. Plus the information flow from librarian bloggers is fantastic too. Check out the Lib Bloggers in my blogroll, and you’ll get the idea 🙂
In a Web 2.0 world collaboration is essential. It’s time that librarians, teacher librarians, media specialists and teachers learnt more from each other – and collaborated more. That’s what Web 2.0 is all about.
judyoconnell.com 
Hahaha! I actually found Clay’s post on this subject very amusing, but I have to say that I’d be the first to burn him at the stake.
I’ve long been waiting for the opportunity to teach RSS feeding to kids and enthuse them with the same addictiveness that’s hooked me in for the last three years. What I really needed was a clean, portable and easy to use reader, which hasn’t really emerged until Google Reader hit the scene.
Once it becomes easy enough to access (which it has) I really see very few obstacles. My year 8 English kids have taken to their Google Reader accounts very enthusiastically. Sure, I may need to structure lesson time to make it happen, and give rich tasks that make good use of it, but I’m already seeing a lot of evidence that at least a quarter of my class independently use Google Reader to access the news and their favourite blogs. And most importantly – kids see the point of it.
M
Hi Patricia – that’s a great list. Thanks for alerting us all to that. I’m sure I had that somewhere before, but completely lost track of it. It’s a fabulous resource pool. Cheers!
Hi Judy
You could check out http://www2.netvibes.com/iedirectory for quite a comprehensive listing of educational blogging – over 200 at time of writing and growing by the day!
Patricia
Thanks for linking to my post Judy. I agree there are so many ways that we can use RSS to make our life easier and yet I find it a shame that some are turning their back on the power of RSS to rely on only referral from sites like Twitter. I, like you, were disappointed to see what educational blogging sites weren’t shown on Alltop.