RSS in Education

I started this project already familiar with RSS since I have been using it for personal purposes for a long time.  Reading an RSS feed is a part of my daily ritual in the same way that reading the paper was for my parents.  I think of RSS, when I think of it at all, as a useful, but mundane tool that life would be slightly less convenient without.

This is a very limiting perspective.  I've fallen into a rut where RSS is no more exciting or engaging than my morning mug of tea.  This assignment required me to set aside my familiarity with RSS to think about how I could use it differently to enhance my classroom.  In particular, I revisited a science news assignment I've seen many teachers do where students are asked to clip a science article from a newspaper and write a response.  Assignments like this have fallen out of favor as the number of students who get a newspaper at home has plummeted.  RSS offers a way to resurrect and improve the science news assignment.

Bringing a science news assignment into the digital realm actually offers quite a few advantages.  RSS makes it extremely easy to get articles from a wide variety of sources, raising the odds that a student can find something that will interest them.  In addition, when stories are clipped from a newspaper and a hand-written page turned into the teacher, only the student who found the article is likely to read it.  By sharing articles on a discussion forum, the entire class has the opportunity to read and respond to what another student has found.

Armed with a fresh view of RSS, I will be examining some of my other classroom practices to see how not only RSS, but other technological tools that seem unremarkable at first glance, could be used to engage my students more effectively.