RSS In Education

Understanding how RSS works and keeping a series of RSS subscriptions through a website like Feedly is a great way for teachers to quickly and easily stay updated on different websites across the internet. RSS goes beyond simple bookmarking since it also updates you whenever there are changes to your websites you subscribe too. Further, when using Feedly I can get a quick preview of the changes and decide whether or not I want to go an view the actual website itself. This both keeps me informed and saves me time. To see an example of my Feedly page and what I have subscribed to check out my video below.

To show my learning of RSS in education I have created a lesson plan for a high school US Government course. I teach at an online high school and my lesson plan is set up to be completed by students on their own pace much like our own courses at Boise State. The lesson asks students to find three different websites related to a civil rights or policy issue of their choice. They then evaluate the websites for accuracy, authoritativeness, objectivity, and other criteria. Students then subscribe to their site RSS feeds on Feedly so they can remain updated on their issue of choice in the future. Another large component of my lesson is a collaboration piece. Students make a screencast sharing their Feedly resources and discussing their evaluations of the sources they subscribed to. Collaboration is an area that my students need more experience in so I have also in the lesson plan required students to comment and make suggestions to each other’s screencast videos. A link to my lesson plan is available here: Using RSS Feeds to curate your own quality web resources in US Government. Exploring your interests in a civil rights or policy issue.

If given more time on this assignment I would look to find a further way to integrate RSS into the assignment itself. While it is great to show students that they can easily remain updated they are really not asked to do this in the assignment. Finding a way to revisit this, maybe a month or so after the assignment and ask them to see what the new issues are would be a great way for them to see how policy and civil rights issues are an evolving process. I have not had an opportunity to test this in a class yet but look forward to seeing how I can integrate this into my teaching to benefit my students.