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Hi - I'm Kelly and I've created this short video as an introduction to RSS and the RSS
reader Feedly.com. This tutorial is for educators working with
adult GED students and intermediate to advanced English Language Learners.
The objective is to help you to understand and be able to explain the general concept
of RSS, identify websites with the RSS capability, create a Feedly.com account, add content,
and organize your account. And then you'll then be able to use this
tool to connect classroom learning to your students' personal interests. This has the
potential to reinforce the material learned in class, and to develop skills that may lead
to self-directed and life-long learning. Let's begin with RSS. RSS stands for Really
Simple Syndication. The orange square with the white radio waves
is the standard icon used to identify that RSS is available for a website.
Basically, a website with the RSS designation includes the formatting required to enable
a reader to subscribe to blogs or news sites and receive timely updates. This capability
eliminates the need to manually check many websites or blogs for new content. New posts
to your chosen sources conveniently come directly to your customized site. There are currently
several available RSS readers. In this tutorial I'll focus on Feedly.
I'll walk you through setting up a Feedly account now.
Go to Feedly.com and choose login. You can sign in with your google account. If you don't
have one, create an account. Once you're logged in, your screen should
look something like this. You'll begin by adding content. You can
choose from some of the items they have, or you can type in your own url and add content
that way If you don't know the url, you can search;
go to the website, I'm looking for saylor.org here. And there it is. Here I go to the RSS
feed icon and I'm going to just copy the url directly into Feedly this way. Paste it
into the search, and there it is. I now choose Follow, and now I have the opportunity to
categorize it. I'm going to create a new category, Online Learning. And Add. And now
I have my new content in my feed. It's as simple as that.
Well, now that you're familiar with RSS and Feedly, I'll describe my vision of how
I'd like to utilize these tools. After working with students to set up their own Feedly accounts
and find websites that are of interest to them, I'll challenge them to connect classroom
studies to their pleasure reading by finding and sharing related information. Possibly
they'll find examples that apply the English grammar rules that we study. Or maybe a news
story will help concepts from science or math lessons become more meaningful.
We'll use a social platform, such as google +, as a way to virtually share and discuss
this related information. And we'll also take time in class to present some of the
interesting material that the students find. I really hope this tutorial is useful to you
and that you'll find some creative ways to introduce this tool into your own learning
environment. Thanks for watching.