My love affair with RSS

I was first introduced to RSS feeds during a presentation by David Warlick at the Leading and Learning conference. It was one of those spine tingling moments that literally made the hair on my arms stand up. This presentation helped me truly understand the power of technology to bring the information to me.

It is really difficult to explain the excitement I had when I left that room that day, but it returns every time I have the opportunity to talk about RSS to someone. Personally, I use RSS in two distinct ways:

1. for professional/personal development
2. to streamline class room activities.

I follow nearly 400 people on Twitter. It seems that when I follow one person it quickly leads to another person... and so on... Of those 400 people most are somehow related to the education field. Some of the people are highly entertaining, some are very intellectual, but they all share a willingness to take me on their learning journey. Most of these people have blogs, which you can see on their Twitter profile page. I often follow these links and I scan/read their blogs. Those that somehow connect to me I add to my Google Reader; a task that takes less than 30 seconds! Whenever those people now make a blog post I can see it and read it in my reader, I can also share it with those that I follow in Google. To be able to see and read all this information that is relevant to me has profoundly changed me.

The second way I use RSS feeds is to follow certain searches. Now following my name on a Google search is a rather pointless exercise for me, since their is another family within Canada that shares my family name (see earlier post). However, I do follow many other search feeds. For current events, I'll follow several feeds (usually using Google News searches) related to a topic I'm covering in my Social Studies classes. These feeds are organized on my Igoogle page. Its very easy to put up on the Smartboard and the students can see the information as it comes. It would be just as easy to use a service like Pageflakes. I have also used it to follow and do collaborative searching using Delicious. Using delicious I would get the students to use a common tag when searching. I would then do a search in Delicious for the specific tag (make sure its a unique tag) and follow that feed. I could then follow how my students were sharing and researching in "REAL TIME".

....love is in the air....