Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts (ch 5) Reflection

Before this class I had never heard of RSS or Really Simple Syndication.  If someone had come up to me and started talking about RSS I would have been totally lost and really confused.  Now I realize that RSS is a very helpful tool and not too hard to use once you get the hang of it.  I think this technology would be very helpful to students and teachers because it concentrates a lot of information in one easily accessible area.   Having a student set up an aggregator where they can subscribe to feeds from different sites would be helpful when students want to find new information on a certain topic.  I think in terms of students using this technology it would be most helpful in a high school level classroom where students have to do a lot of research for projects or papers.  It would also be an advantage to students who already are very passionate about something and want to know when new information about that topic is written about.  As a teacher, an RSS feed would be helpful in finding new ways to teach certain information or just keeping up to date with new information that is being published on the topic you are teaching.  It would also be a good way to keep up to date on current events in education as a whole so that you can make sure that you are still following all the rules.  Having students set up aggregators so they can receive their own RSS feeds would be a good way to teach students how to evaluate websites and decide which ones have good information and which ones don’t.  Once they subscribe to a certain feed, they will still have to sort through their aggregators and decide what information they get is important and what information is not.  I think as a future teacher I would either have each student set up their own aggregator or have the class make one as a whole.  I want to teach science, so I would have each of my students find information on a certain topic we will be discussing that year and subscribe to and RSS feed for that topic.  It would then be that student’s responsibility to check and maintain the feeds that come in on that subject.  This would be an introduction on how to use the technology so that maybe later in the year they each set up their own aggregators and maintain their own personal information.  Either way I think this RSS technology is a good one to have because you have access to a lot of information in one area.