Angela Maiers Educational Services: Happy RSS Awareness Day

Happy May Day! It's appropriate that today is also RSS Awareness Day.

A few questions:

What is RSS?
Why Should I Care?
How Can I Use RSS in a Classroom?

Great questions!

What is RSS?
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. It's a way that new information published online gets distributed to various content aggregators.

You probably already use RSS, receiving updates through email, a home page like iGoogle or MyYahoo, or possibly with a feed aggregator.

It's a great way to collect information from blogs and other sites without having to visit them every day to see if they updated. There are also sites like Alltop.com that help gather great content into a single space. And they do it with and because of the power of RSS.

Why Should I Care?
By not having to visit web pages to see IF they update, subscribing via RSS allows the content you want delivered to you -- in any fashion you wish. Email, Aggregator, Mobile...whatever -- so you save time.

A lot of folks who subscribe to this blog do so via email. Though that's one way, I wonder if it would be more productive for folks under a heavy email load to try out Google Reader (a web-based RSS aggregator) or GreatNews (a desktop application).

You can also use RSS to subscribe to various searches. If you're doing research on a topic, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of Google News or a Google Blog Search. You can also subscribe to a topic or name on YouTube or Twitter (using TweetScan). As Mike Sansone says, "Search Once and Subscribe."

How Can I Use RSS in a Classroom?
Well, we already mentioned the fantastic research possibilities above, but there are other ways. Will Richardson has a great document for educators who want a quick start to RSS.

One way I've used RSS is with my grad students. We create a wiki for the class and allow the discussion and collaborate to exist outside classroom walls. In fact, the wikis I've used still exist and are being used even thought the classes are finished.

Want to give it a try? Subscribe to my blog's RSS feed by some other fashion than email. I'd suggest GoogleReader. Then, go to Alltop and subscribe to a few other blogs or news sites. In a few days, you'll find you're receiving more information, in less time -- without spam.

RSS - I appreciate you!