DE Oracle @ UMUC

RSS Feeds: Two Birds, One Information-Soaked Stone - Part II

Sharon Huston

Instructional Support Specialist

Center for Support of Instruction

Published: March-April 2010

Category: » Online-pedagogy » Teaching-tools

As discussed in the first article in this series, RSS is a great tool you can use to stay on top of developments in your field. RSS also can be used to enrich your online classroom. This article examines some common themes for using RSS in the classroom, ways to share feeds with your students, and ideas for filtering/customizing feeds. At the end of this article are links to several DE Oracle tutorials that will assist you with publishing RSS feeds in WebTycho.

Using RSS Feeds in the Classroom

Generally speaking, classroom RSS activities can be grouped into two categories:

• Collecting and sharing information
• Monitoring student activities

As you become more accustomed with RSS, you will likely find additional uses for it that will further enhance your classroom activities. Some examples of how you might incorporate RSS feeds in your classroom are discussed below.

Collecting/Sharing Information

RSS feeds are useful for gathering and sharing information with your students. You can use feeds to collect information that you think matters, share that information with your class, and then open the floor for discussion. Feeds help students see how your field relates to their lives. Sharing information in this way is a great form of modeling, providing students with an inside glimpse of what the world is like when the textbooks are no longer sufficient. It also makes students aware that true professionalism in any field requires a strong commitment to lifelong learning.

There are many types of information you might want to share with your class through an RSS feed, including:

• Current events stories on specific topics, such as elections or wars
• Journal articles of interest to your discipline
• Relevant job listings to increase student awareness of how classroom objectives relate to future paychecks
• Tutorials to help with technologies that students may need to use to be successful
• New articles about changes/issues in a related industry

These information-sharing feeds can be used throughout the semester or for specific class assignments/discussion.

Monitoring Student Activities

While the bulk of your class activity (especially all grades and evaluative comments) should live within WebTycho, it is sometimes desirable to use Web 2.0 tools to enhance your classroom. You can use RSS feeds to help you monitor the activities of students who are using these external tools. Most Web 2.0 services—including Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Diigo, YouTube, Blogger, and LinkedIn—allow users to create RSS feeds. Most social networking tools also support RSS—but note that at the present time, Facebook does not support it.

You can use RSS to watch social media sites for student participation, such as student blog updates on class blogs or student photos on a photo-sharing site like Flickr. As an example of the latter scenario, art history students could take photos of Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns located in their cities. They could post their photos to Flickr, make their photos viewable to the public, and then tag the photos with a predetermined custom class tag (such as "UMUC-ARTH-334"). The tag's RSS feed could alert the entire class that a new photo with that tag has been added to Flickr—making it easy for all class members to locate the newest additions.

Sharing RSS Feeds

You need to consider how you want to display and use the information in a feed so that you implement the best approach to sharing that information with your students. You can share a feed with students in a few ways:

• Teach your students how to use an RSS reader and have them locate and set up their own RSS feeds. This is a good practice in any situation where teaching objectives include conducting research or evaluating information resources.
• Build your own RSS feed and give its address to your students for use in their own RSS reader. This method gives students some autonomy to further customize a feed on their own.
• Build your own RSS feed and post the feed directly in the classroom. This method provides you with a level of control over what articles students are actually accessing and reading for your class.

Note that when students use their own RSS readers, as in the first two options listed above, you have no control over what they do. You cannot determine if students are using an RSS reader at all or if they are accessing the specific feeds or articles as instructed. The third method, on the other hand, ensures that all your students will see the material you want them to see.

For the first option, if setting up an RSS feed is a required student activity, you can have students post their own feeds directly in the classroom, which can serve two purposes. First, it verifies that they are doing the work as directed. Second, if posted to a public area of the classroom (such as Conferences), students can view and learn from each others' RSS feeds.

If you post your own feed in the classroom, as indicated by the third option, there are many tools you can use to accomplish this task. Google Reader, for example, provides a quick and reatively easy way to share individual articles from an RSS feed you have subscribed to. If you want to share a Web site's entire RSS feed automatically instead of manually selecting articles to share, a tool such as Grazr is a good alternative.

Filtered/Custom RSS Feeds: Going Beyond the Basics

In some cases, instead of exposing students to an unregulated RSS feed, it may be better to select specific articles from your own feeds and share them with your students. Doing so ensures that you are hand-picking articles that will be immediately relevant. It would be a wasted effort, for example, to send a graduate-level organic chemistry article to students in the second week of Chemistry I. Many RSS readers allow you to filter your feeds with keywords. Google Reader, for instance, has a labeling feature that lets you tag articles (such as with keywords "Chemistry I" and "Graduate Chemistry") in the feeds you subscribe to.

When you filter an existing feed by keywords, this is usually accomplished by creating a new custom feed based on the original feed(s). Many sites, including the New York Times, will allow users to create a custom RSS feed by filtering the site's feed. For example, your customized feed from this site might include only those articles appearing in the Health section that have the keyword "senior" in them.

Some sites allow you to build an RSS feed right from their search page, including the job search engine Indeed.com. Making a custom RSS feed to track specific job openings from a site such as this is simple: Search the site for, say, "marketing," then click the RSS icon in your browser's toolbar. On the RSS feed page, you can then subscribe to the feed and add it to your preferred RSS reader.

If a site does not have tools to generate a custom feed, you can use a third-party tool like FeedWeaver or Yahoo Pipes to perform this task. FeedWeaver is easy to use. After setting up a free FeedWeaver account, you can give FeedWeaver the feed address (such as cnn.com), then specify that you want to see only the articles mentioning, for example, "bank merger." FeedWeaver will strip out the unwanted articles and create a new RSS feed containing your keywords.

FeedWeaver can also combine and filter several RSS feeds into a single new RSS feed, which can be very useful. For example, if your students write blogs as part of their classroom activities, FeedWeaver can collect the RSS feeds for each student's blog and roll them into one super RSS feed that notifies the entire class when a blog has been updated—a much more manageable approach for finding blog updates than visiting each blog individually several times a week.

Conclusion—And a Final Caveat

As you can see, RSS feeds are highly flexible. You can use RSS feeds to in many different ways to enhance your online teaching and provide useful resources for yourself and your students, The technology has been put to uses its creators probably never envisioned. Once you understand the basics, you'll be surprised at how quickly you'll integrate RSS into your daily life and (more importantly) into your students' lives. If the feed updates frequently, your class will have a constant stream of new content to review and discuss.

As you incorporate RSS into your teaching repertoire, keep in mind one last detail: As feeds grow and update over time, older articles are often dropped—so information that is viewable early in the semester may not be available at the end of the semester. If the information in a feed is crucial to a classroom exercise, you may want to place a link to the item(s) directly in your classroom to ensure that your students have continual access to it.

Related Tutorials

The following step-by-step tutorials will help you share feeds using various RSS tools and publish them in your classroom. Please note that while these tutorials demonstrate feed sharing from only two RSS tools; Google Reader and Grazr, the directions for doing so in other tools will be similar—and the steps for posting them in the classroom will be the same.

• Adding an RSS Feed to Your WebTycho Classroom Using Google Reader
  This tutorial demonstrates how to share one or more articles from an RSS feed you have subscribed to within Google Reader and publish them in your WebTycho classroom.
• Creating a Bundle of Shared RSS Items Using Google Reader
  When you tag articles in Google Reader with a specific label, the tool creates "bundles," or groups of articles, that have the same tag. This tutorial demonstrates how to create a bundle that you can then publish to your WebTycho classroom.
• Adding an RSS Feed to Your WebTycho Classroom Using Grazr
  This tutorial demonstrates how to create a Grazr feed widget and publish it in your WebTycho classroom.
• Also see How to Set Up and Use Google Reader for Reading RSS Feeds from Part I of this series if you need a refresher on getting started with Google Reader.