After watching the YouTube video on the blackboard site (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU) which explained step by step how to set up an account, I found creating my own account a simple task. Since joining I have found the RSS aggregator to be a time saving tool, linking me to my peer’s blogs and other websites of interest. It’s just a simple cut and paste of someone else’s blog URL or website URL and your monitoring their activity from just one website.
What is an RSS aggregator?
RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. Many people describe it as a ‘news feed’ that you subscribe to. I found the following explanation at, www.problogger.net/what-is-rss/ really easy to understand.
I find the ’subscription’ description helpful. It’s like subscribing to a magazine that is delivered to you periodically but instead of it coming in your physical mail box each month when the magazine is published it is delivered to your ‘RSS Reader’ every time your favorite website updates.
“RSS is the key to staying informed and preventing information overload (Farkas, 2007).”
Theory and classroom uses for RSS aggregators
This web 2.0 technology fits well into Kearsley & Shneiderman’s (1999) Engagement Theory framework under the first principle, “Relate”. The “Relate” principle “emphasizes team efforts that involve communication, planning, management and social skills (Kearsley & Schneiderman, 1999).”
In the lives of today’s children the web plays a vital role in terms of acquiring information. Classroom teachers could subscribe students to relevant websites for classroom activities or create a class blog page, then by using an RSS aggregator all students would receive constant updates when a new entry is posted on their subscribed websites. This eliminates the need to check each site frequently and effectively shares all information with all subscribed learners.
References
Farkas, M. (2007), Social Software in Libraries: Building Collaboration, Communictaion and Community Online, Information Today Inc., Newark, NJ.
Kearsley, G. & Shneiderman, B. (1999), Engagement Theory: A framework for technology-based teaching and learning, viewed 30 July 2009 <http://home.sprynet.com/~gkearsley/engage.htm>
ProBlogger: What is RSS? (n.d.), viewed 13th August 2009 < http://www.problogger.net/what-is-rss/>
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