Reasons to RSS

Next week our district is going to introduce RSS feeds to a large number of teachers. We've booked four labs at one of the high schools and will divide the group for smaller hands-on sessions.

I started the ball rolling by tweeting out a request asking how/why people use RSS feeds and got the following replies:



To this I would add:
-Use news feeds to track current events.
-Use delicious feeds to have bookmarks with specific tags sent to you.
-Subscribe to photo feeds from flickr.
-And this comprehensive list - 100 Cool Things You Can do With RSS (NB not all of these suggestions may be suitable for school use.)

Some of the online resources we've found:

Commoncraft: RSS in Plain English
Commoncraft: Google Reader in Plain English

Google Reader for Beginners

We've come up with a list of suggested feeds in a variety of subject areas and grade levels.

And of course Will Richardson's definitive RSS Guide is posted on his blog.

Some of the better known feed aggregators are Google Reader, Netvibes and Pageflakes.

Why are we doing this? Our hope is to set teachers up with some good professional reading over the summer when they will have time to ponder and play.

Do you have blogs you would recommend? I'd be happy to add them to our list. Please add a comment.