Using RSS Feed Readers

 Exploring possible tools for RSS feeds was initially frustrating. Bloglines was blocked by my firewall. Mozilla Live Bookmarks seemed complicated. Pageflakes drew a blank. Netvibes was interesting, but it offered more than I needed as a beginner. I read Will Richardson's chapter on setting up RSS feeds, but the instructions were confusing to me. I signed up for Merlot, but wasn't able to add it into my Feedly. Maybe I'm not doing it right, but for now, I saved the link in my Diigo account.  

This week,  I tried Feedly. It was easy to set up, and there was an app for my iOS devices. It was also free. The links on Richard Byrne's "Free Technology for Teachers" provided a rich set of new resources that I added to my feed. Now that I have Feedly set up, I can move over the blogs that I'm sending to my email inbox, and maybe there will be less "stuff" flooding it.

I'm still confused about a few things.When I tried to add a URL for www.mathpickle.com to my reader, an error message came up. The instructions said to add the full URL, but that didn't work either.I tried to add NASA Education to my reader, but it didn't work either. This was the URL: http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/#.UwE6BIWhaO0.  Why do some of the links in the RSS feed discussion board come up as bookmarks instead of URLs? How would I use those to add to my reader?I found a really rich Math and Science website, and wanted to add it to my RSS reader, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. I pinned it on my Pinterest board and automatically Tweeted the pin. Then I tried to add this site to my RSS reader, and only the Russian version was accessible.

I had no trouble finding feeds for teacher tools. The difficulties were mostly for student resources. There has to be an easy solution here, but I don't know it yet.

Two websites that I have used in my Middle School classroom are PBS Kids and NY Times Learning Network. When I tried to link PBS Kids to my RSS feed I found Dragonfly TV, which has podcasts for and by kids on science. I added that to my reader.

The NY Times Learning Network is a blog that has short articles on hot topics for teens. The teen readers blog their responses. This is a good exercise in authentic reading and writing. I noticed that one of the articles was about sexuality. This would not be a topic for public or open discussion in some private religious schools. An option would be to use specific articles and have kids blog locally about them, without including a link to the whole site.That would defeat the purpose of having an RSS feed. This comes down to the question of whether an open RSS feed is really the best idea for a younger age group of students.Younger children still need to learn to understand their values and evaluate sources. It makes sense to keep those resources for older students. Once students have been trained in critical thinking, and making independent decisions, this can work.

Using RSS feeds in the classroom would require students to practice NETS-S standards for research and information fluency. They would have to analyze and evaluate the sources. They would have to select their own information choices from the teacher provided choices, and report their findings in some format. Students would also be able to practice communication and collaboration, by participating on online blogging. They could blog on their classroom blog on on a student or outside blog, depending on the students and the design of the lesson. Critical thinking and problem solving would be a very important skill to practice in using RSS feed. Students need to evaluate the validity and bias of sources and compare and contrast their own point of view with that of the resources.