rss

21st Century Learning #95
Wendy Drexler on the Networked Student
February 12, 2009

Are your students collecting RSS feeds in Google Reader, bookmarking sites as a group in Delicious, blogging, interviewing content area experts they found through Google Scholar, and teaching the section of the course for which they are responsible?  Wendy Drexler's students are doing all of this.  This is a must listen for those of us who dream of the day when education is a more active, accountable process for students and teachers. 

 

Also, check out Wendy's The Networked Learner video.

Click here for the chat transcript

Our guest, Jennifer Dorman, gave lots of great information about using RSS in education.

1. We defined RSS feeds (sorta like a magazine subscription, but online);
2. We discussed why you would want to use it as a teacher, and in your classroom;
3. We shared examples of how we use it (sometimes for ourselves and our professional development, sometimes to automate information given to and from students); and
4. We talked about opportunities and challenges.

You can find our planning wiki here.

Some featured bookmarks from the show are here:

• From Jennifer Dorman:
  RSS for Educators wiki page
  RSS Presentation file
• RSS in Plain English (from Lee LeFever at CommonCraft, examples it really simply)

A more extensive list of bookmark is here on Diigo.

One issue that came up was the lack of RSS on content pages geared towards students. We've used feeds from Highlights, and Discovery Science. If you have other elementary-age content that has an RSS feed, please share it on in our Diigo group, or here as a comment. Thanks!

Chat Log Below

­This was a special webcast from the National Writing Project's (NWP) ­Tech Matters`07 -- an annual summer institute sponsored by the Tech Liaisons Network of the NWP. In addition to several teachers who are working together in Chico, CA as part of Tech Matters, we were joined by Writing Project teachers Bill O'Neil (Trenton WP) and Bud Hunt (Colorado State University WP). Also two Writing Project teachers who were participants in Tech Maters`06 joined us, Donna Bragg, Penn State Lehigh Valley Writing Project and Lynne Culp, UCLA Writing Project. Thanks also to Susan Ettenheim who streamed for us and edited this podcast, Lee Baber who added more music to our lives, and Doug Symington who was there to remind us about his show EdTech Brainstorms, which on on Thursdays nights(Americas)/Friday (Asia,Oceania) 2amGMT.