Avoiding Obsolescence: How to Keep a Good Lesson Drift into the Archives...
http://www.themediadrop.com/archives/001588.php#moreRSS Feeds
Managing Multiple Media Flows
Over the years there have been lesson plans I have created that I have fallen in love with, so much that every year I teach them without any variation. As you might expect, every year the lesson gets a little more stale, until finally a lesson that I used to teach with passion is little more than something to give to a substitute teacher when I can't be in the classroom. Everyone in this class has created a wonderful unit plan, but if you don't retool it every now and again, adding new material, removing parts that didn't quite work, you'll end up handing out worksheets to your class, reading the newspaper while your students are filling them out.
We often don't have the time to stay current with the many educational journals that are published every week or month. But if we don't read up, our lessons won't continue to evolve into more effective, engaging instruction. Before the days of computers, "clipping services," used to summarize news and journal articles, so that you could quickly scan a list of articles to see if there was anything of interest to you.
Today, there is a "killer app" called RSS News Feed that allows you to see when websites have added new content. You can get the latest headlines and video in one place, as soon as it's published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from. The easiest way to set up your own personal news reader is to subscribe to a Web based service. The following websites are the most commonly used:
You can also download an add-on for Mozilla Firefox.
Let's look at an example of an RSS compiler. My Bloglines webpage is where I track over a dozen online educational publications. You can click on the 'EDU 33692' link in the left window to view all of the headlines from all of the publications, or click on any of the listed publications to just view that specific publication's recent articles. Whenever I have a few minutes, I can quickly scroll through the headlines of all of these publications to see if there is anything of interest to me. Instead of subscribing to each of the publications and getting swamped with email, or clicking on scores of links, I can have each website feed me their digital news clipping, all on one list that I can quick scan through for articles of interest.
Anyone can create their own RSS feed webpage by subscribing to one of the services described above, and then simply clicking on the orange 'RSS' button most online journals provided on their homepage. Here are some lists of the most commonly subscribed to RSS feeds:
And here are some directories:
Mashing Feeds
Filtering Multiple RSS Feeds
Even with RSS feed listing, you can quickly end up with hundreds of titles to scan. Hence the next leap in online content gathering: the mashup, sometimes called the Web 2.0 remix. The mashup is expected to be one of the technologies most likely to reshape educational pedagogies in 2008. Instead of viewing multiple RSS feeds in a linear fashion, line by line, a mashup can search for specific keywords of interest, and filter down all of the articles to only those that have the keywords of interest. An example of a mashup can be found on the Washington Post's website.
There are several online providers of mashups, I use the Yahoo Pipe service. Let's look at one of my mashups. I'm constantly on the look for Chemistry Teaching positions, so I've created RSS feeds to craigslist.com, insidehighered.com, and monster.com. I then created a filter that would only post entries that included the term, "chemistry," in it. Hence, in one page I can view multiple job posting for chemistry teaching positions. It's all good!
A more complicated mashup is my educational social software pipe. I listed about 20 RSS feeds to various educational online publications, and filtered hundreds of articles using the keywords, "blog," "wiki," e-learning," "digital natives," web 2.0," and "WebQuest." Currently, 12 items are posted, all relevant to my interest in technology in the classroom – what this class is all about.
Respectfully submitted,
Robert Lewis
Adjunct Professor
Boricua College
No comments:
Post a Comment