The New Killer App for Educators: The Fifth Adventure

RSS feeds provide a way for educators to subscribe once to a host of weblogs, then every time something is posted to your preferred list of weblogs, the post is automatically downloaded onto your aggregator (the feed collector).

This helps you save time from having to go to thirty sites and scroll through thirty emails. You go to one site, scan all the feeds and emails and keep what you want, organize it, and read it now or save it for later. Also, every time someone publishes something via blog, with a key word that you can set up, which will aggregate this blog into your feed as well for your reviewing (which can be helpful if you are researching a topic or if you've published something and you want to track it around with some of its key words).

Richardson suggests using Google Reader as an aggregator, as opposed to bloglines.com (ok, I'll go and do this again. . . since I already set one up on bloglines.com but have been having difficulty with its initial use). Note to self: check to see if there is a National Science Teachers Association feed I can subscribe to as well as some Middle School feed.

Clarence Fisher likens an aggregator to a personal guide. This can be a significant analogy to the realm of student literacy. In education, part of the role of a teacher is to help teach literacy and to promote independent literacy learning. "As a teacher," Fisher says, "I consider one of my main jobs to be serving as a personal guide, helping kids to fill their aggregators with content that is relevant and useful for them."

The application that most excites me, at this point, with an RSS feed is using this with student weblogs. Hence, I can collect all student blogs into my aggregator, allowing me to "scan through all of the class content in one place," says Richardson.