RSS
I can’t seem to get teachers to buy into RSS. I suppose it’s not the easy thing to understand, but there doesn’t seem to be any interest in adding to their Bloglines, let alone using RSS with kids. They seem to really gravitate toward wikis, less on blogging.
I wonder why that is. Is RSS to difficult too understand? Is it too labor intensive to get your aggregator stocked with feeds? For me, my Bloglines has become my virtual desktop. I discover and learn so much. In fact, recently, it’s been getting a little out of hand. Earlier in April I was away for almost two weeks. I did find time to sift through everything, but there were so many articles I wanted to dig into more. So I saved them in my aggregator. As of today, I have 99 items to work through. I know there is good stuff in them, though. I think I need to put some time aside each day just to start working though the large number of posts. If only there were more minutes in a day.... 
Anyone have any thoughts on getting people fired up about RSS?
I used to prefer newsgator but I have transferred everything to my google homepage. I keep my email there… which sorts correspondence by thread and allows me to see the history of any correspondence I’ve had in which both parties respond directly to the previous email. I have a calendar, google talk and other widgets that mean something to me and I have my google reader. Then my little google icon at the bottom of my screen will preview my mail before I even open it and I can decide to open and peruse or ignore for the time being. I recommend it highly as a very smart tool. I haven’t gotten my students to rss feeds yet, because… well my district just allowed me to have a class blog a few weeks ago.. I’m still busy and hoping to get individual blogs. Once I’ve got those I’ll intro rss feeds to them (google or newsgator or any other they want)
ps. can you tell me where you got your widget for email verification?
Posted by on 05/03 at 05:49 AMThanks for suggesting Google Reader. I’ve imported my feeds and will give it a try.
The email verification is something built into the blogging software I use.
Posted by on 05/03 at 10:20 AMI find too many teachers yet aren’t reading blogs regularly.
Reading blogs = time.
Time = collecting, reading feeds.
I think it’s connected to a culture of not reading information online. That will improve, albeit slowly, over time.
I find the teachers that use it have students blogging and use RSS as a mechanism for checking the student feeds.
Posted by John Hendron on 05/03 at 09:52 PM
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