Pockets of Change

After a response about RSS on Beyond-School, it was respectfully pointed out to me (thanks, dear colleagues!) that perhaps others might like to know about the different ways the “average” teacher or student might use RSS to be more productive. First, an edited version of my original comment:

[RSS is] one possibility of many for gathering information. And it just happens to be a rather efficient one in terms of the amount of time it takes to set up, use, and then check. . . . Of all the tools I’ve shown to my colleagues, RSS has got to be the one they appreciate the most — “wow, you mean the information comes to ME?” I’ve not gotten into Diigo yet, but I use Twitter now, and two aggregators daily to “get” my info. (And iGoogle is always, always my starting place, though other people I know do not . . . find it worked for them.)

In response to your question: “What’s our purpose for teaching aggregators?” I find aggregators especially useful for following all sorts of things that have nothing to do with blogs. Some examples:

1 - Calendars of various types have RSS feeds. In my present school, this means I know when a laptop cart is available, or when I can book the drama room. I suspect (though am not certain) that other Calendar apps like Google Calendar or iCal have simlilar settings.

2 - Documents — I can add GoogleDocs to my iGoogle page and be notified any time there is a change to documents I share with others. Not related to Google, within our current school portal, I have RSS feeds set up for different storage areas so that I know when documents have been changed or added.

3 - Photos — RSS can be used to track photos on Flickr, Picasa, and any other number of photo sites, which is incredibly useful for various purposes.

First, The Basics:

To begin, I would like to recommend viewing Jeff Utecht’s screencast about RSS — that’s if you can view it. It will take a while to load (eons, perhaps, if you live in a developing country with <1MB bandwidth), and 15 minutes to view. If you can’t get to Jeff’s screencast, then you might like to watch this RSS in Plain English clip, which will take much less time: (Thanks to Sue for this!)

And now, the elaboration (and then some!):

Here’s the thing: Although RSS began a few years ago as a way to get information from blogs and news sites, it has evolved into so much more. I’m not suggesting that educators use RSS because they should read more blogs. That’s up to you to decide — maybe you want to, maybe you don’t. But RSS can be used for basic productivity tasks that will really make your life easier (I promise!).

Once you’ve got your reader set up (Google Reader, Bloglines, or even the one in Outlook), you can add ANYTHING that has an RSS feed. What kinds of things, you ask?

Back to my points above…

1- Calendars and basic scheduling

Calendars and basic scheduling v.1 — as I said in the original comment, we can use RSS feeds for the calendar on our Sharepoint portal at our school.

• What this means: Any time a teacher posts an assignment deadline, cancels their laptop cart booking, or adds their birthday, I find out about it without even having to ask.

Calendars and basic scheduling v.2 — Public calendars, or even just those shared between a few people such as in Google’s calendar, now have an RSS feed. Hurrah!

• What this means: When I’m not sure about American Idol’s showtimes, I can add them to my Google calendar and subscribe to my RSS feed so I know if it changes.

2- Documents and Files

Again, on a Sharepoint portal, every storage area has an RSS feed. For example, here is what one looks like on our English A Grade 7 area:

And, outside our school area, I can get an RSS feed from each Google Document I’m working on:

• What this means: Any time someone adds, removes, or changes a document or file I am working on or using*, I find out about it. My reader tells me, so I don’t have to be a control freak!

3- Photos and Videos

If you’re not yet using a cool photo website like Flickr or Picasa, well — what are you waiting for? Here are two examples of how I can use RSS to find out when someone has added images to my favorite places.

In Flickr, I have several Favorites marked. If you like my favorites, and want to know when I add another one, you can find the feed here:

And if I’ve created a photoset of a special event, and you want to know when more photos have been added, you might find it here:

In Picasa albums, you’ll find the feed at the bottom of the page on the right:

• What this means: When my crazy uncle Phil posts yet another photo of his souped-up ski-doo, I’ll immediately know! (Ok, so my uncle Phil doesn’t have a souped-up ski-doo — but if he did, I know he’d want me to see the latest photos.)

What about YouTube?

Want to know what the most viewed videos are of the day? RSS it:

You can also set up an RSS feed for your favorite user by following the instructions on this page. (A bit more complicated, but still useful if you want to track a particular user’s content.)

• What this means: I will (finally!) be able to watch every last Muppets video ever uploaded to YouTube, and will spend hours regaling my students of the virtues of learning-by-puppet.

And then some…

A few other nifty places I have found RSS feeds to be useful (both for school, and not):

• Movie listings
• Discussion Boards
• New Deals @ Amazon

I’m sure once you start using RSS, you’ll find more great ways to use it!

(more…)

After all that talk about small steps towards change, our school is about to undergo a  watershed event that will propel us into the midst of rapid change: we are moving to a 1:1 tablet program, first in grades 10 and 11 this August, and then adding more grade levels in subsequent years so that we are a full 1:1 program in 4 years.

As a member of our school’s Tablet Steering Committee, I had the pleasure of sitting in on a 2-hour meeting this afternoon.  The bad news is, it was two hours long. The good news is, it wasn’t totally unbearable. A lot of good things came out of that meeting. We identified  a lot of logistical issues that need to be resolved between now and August (stay tuned for late breaking news as it unfolds).

There is one point that I think is single-most important issue on the table: identifying a small number of skills that can be easily taught (not necessarily mastered) to students and staff to allow us to harness the power tablet we will be given?

In a perfect world, these are the skills that I would like to teach to every student and every staff member who will be using the tablets next year, maybe during that first week of school in some sort of workshop format:

•  RSS - This simple tool will have the biggest impact on all teachers since less that 10% of teachers know what it is, let alone know what it can do.  It will revolutionize the way that information is accessed. Heck, for some of us, it already has.
• OneNote - Like one teacher told me recently, if you’re not using OneNote (effectively), you might as well save some money and buy a laptop instead of a tablet.
• Outlook - The ability to pull information off of our SharePoint portal is key. Read and update shared calendars, get notifications for updates to particular wikis or folders, even use it as your RSS feed reader if you like. Plus the other well-known functions like meeting requests, task lists, and oh yeah, email.

I think that if we can start with these three areas, we will be well on our way of increasing efficiency, productivity and collaboration. And isn’t that one of the main goals of moving to a digital environment?

Photo Credit: Gerard Bierens