Saturday, September 21, 2013

Aggregation RSS tools in Education

One problem with the Internet is that there is so much information that it is easy for someone to get information overload.  Millions of blogs, websites and social media networks can sometimes make someone feel overwhelmed.  I can completely understand this feeling.  I have learned about hundreds of new resources and blogs while progressing through the Instructional Media program and I have honestly felt overwhelmed with all of the information. I am quite familiar with technology and I am a self-proclaimed nerd.  If all of this information makes me nervous, I can’t imagine those who are not so familiar. Aggregation tools can help calm this feeling of being overwhelmed!
            I have a handful of blogs that I check out quite frequently.  Some of these blogs are educational like edutopia, and others are to fulfill my nerdy nature (like macrumors).  I also follow a ton of political and paleo blogs too.  I haven’t really expanded my blog reading beyond about 5-10 sites because it does get overwhelming trying to keep everything organized.  I enjoyed using feedly and I added all of my favorite blogs.  I like how you can read all of your favorite blogs all in one place.  You can also keep all of your blogs organized by category and not have to worry about finding the URL for a blog that you wanted to read daily.

            Not only can I see using feedly.com to develop my own network and educational toolbox, but I can see how feedly and other aggregation tools like pinterest in the classroom.  I could create a teacher’s communication blog to help communicate information to students and parents.  I can use it to communicate project due dates, and resources to be used for papers or projects.  It can be used to organize all sorts of information. If I was doing a project on current events, I could have the students use RSS feeds to aggregate news articles from different sources to analyze media biases and news events!

www.feedly.com
www.pinterest.com 

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