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Hi, my name is Brendan Lea and welcome to RSS: What’s the Buzz? My aim today is to
talk about the benefits of feeds and readers, to guide you through the process of setting
up your own reader, and to talk about their potential use within education.
RSS stands for Rich Site Summary and this is the official logo to tell you that a feed
is available. In order to best understand what a feed and reader can do for you, I would
like to compare how I used to do research with how I do research now. About 15 years
ago, when I was researching current events for a course in university I would go from
site, to site, to site to see if there was any new information about the topic that I
needed. The process was not only time consuming, it was often frustrating when I couldn’t
find any new information. However, with the use of feeds and readers, the flow of information
has been reversed. Instead of me going to see the information, the information comes
to me. This has saved me a lot of time and a lot of frustration in my research.
Today, I will show you how to use The Old Reader. You can register for The Old Reader
using your Facebook, Google+, or another email address. I’m going to use my Google+ ID.
When you log in, you are going to want to start adding feeds. To do this click the Add
a Subscription button. To find the feed URL go to your favorite web site, look for the
RSS logo, ignore all of this text, copy the URL, paste it into the subscription box, and
click the plus. You are now subscribed to your first feed.
Now that I have set up my reader, I can see that I have 128 unread posts. To view the
posts I can go into All Items, Subscriptions, or one of the specific lists that I have set
up to keep myself organized. There are many different features that this tool has to offer
and I encourage you to play around.
RSS readers change how information is delivered and this can have an impact on education.
For teachers wishing to develop their Personal Learning Network they can subscribe to the
blogs of other teachers to learn from their experiences and obtain useful new information.
If I was teaching current events, I would have students subscribe to several different
feeds to stay on top of the news. I would also ask students to subscribe to news sites
which present the information in a different light, so that they can compare and contrast
how different media outlets present the information given to them.