Earthling

Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.

Earthling reader and edublogger John Blake sent me a really interesting write-up of the ways he has incorporated personal publishing and RSS into his classroom practice. He's also interested in hearing about how other teachers have used it in their curricula, so I wanted to publish what he sent me and throw it open to any other teachers who'd like to share their ideas. In the meantime I'll do some research as well and help develop a list of resources. Please add any suggestions, anecdotes, and stories to the comments of this blog entry.

Here's what John had to say:

How about a list of how RSS can be used for teachers to communicate with parents and the community? I am no expert on this, but there are commercial web pages (CMS)/hosting companies that target educational markets. I like using myReader because it is easy on my old teacher eyes. In your post, "I think one of the best kept secrets of RSS in the general web user population is that it's not just for news; it's useful way to get content of all kinds (photos, information, alerts, updates, shopping info)..." This is true and I would venture a guess that less than 1% of parents in our district even know what an news reader/aggregator is. I try to teach my students to use them and hope they see the benefits and uses of using them.

Here is my list of how I have used RSS in my classroom and attempted to use it with parents and community:

1. Student Projects: In science class, my students have used Bubbleshare.com and its RSS syndication to share their individual digital storytelling projects with their classmates and parents (those that even have email addresses). Students use Bloglines to aggregate their class projects. The only problem - the number of steps this required - to go from creating the story to looking at their classmates projects and peer evaluating them takes time. However, if the end project helps them remember the bones in the body, then it is almost worth it!

2. Classroom Podcasting: We created a blog and a series of podcasts. Students used iTunes to subscribe to the class podcasts, and share them with their family.