Staying Informed

Personalize Your View To The World
Keeping up with the current trends in education is often difficult. Many educators subscribe to newspapers, journals, or other publications to keep current.  However, there are many web tools that you can use to subscribe to online information and have it all in one place.   

Pre-Assess your skills for this "Thing"

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Before beginning this "Thing", complete the Pre-Assessment  of your technology proficiency.

RSS

It has become a daunting task to stay up-to-date on the immense amount of news, blogs, podcasts, and information available to us when surfing the Web. Many sites now send out a feed from their site in a standardized format called RSS.

RSS (really simple syndication) allows readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites, to aggregate (collect) the feeds from many sites into one place. There are a number of "aggregators" available to collect the feeds in one place.

Based on what is available in your county, select one of the following options for staying informed.

Click on this link to watch a video explaining RSS in Plain English by CommonCraft, LLC.

Aligned to NETS-T: 1.a, 1.b, 1.d, 2.a, 2.b, 2.c, 3.a, 3.b, 3.c, 3.d, 4.b, 4.d, 5.a, 5.c, 5.d

Connections to Marzano Strategies: Cooperative Learning; Cues, Questions,
and Advanced Organizers

iGoogle

With iGoogle, you can collect your feeds and read them on your iGoogle page. You will first need a Google Account. After creating a Google account, you will locate Google Reader in the list of Google options. Google Reader allows you to add subscriptions from each RSS feed you would like to subscribe to. You copy and paste the RSS feed information into a short form in Google Reader. Then when you create your iGoogle page, you will select the option to include Google Reader on your page. Then each time you login into your iGoogle page you will be able to read the feeds coming from your favorite sources. Click on the iGoogle image for a how- tutorial.

Netvibes

Netvibes  a "personal start Page" allows you to easily save RSS feeds (blogs, podcasts, etc.) in one location for quick reading. The following link will give you a complete  tutorial on Netvibes features and directions on how to set it up.

21things Hands-On Activity and Assignment:

1. Before beginning this "Thing", complete the Pre-Assessment of your technology proficiency.

2. Select one of the RSS aggregators above and create an account. 

3. Navigate to three of your favorite sites which could include: blogs, news sites, and/or podcasts. Select those that you want to subscribe to and add them to your RSS aggregator. 

4. Capture screen shots of your RSS aggregator page, showing some of the feeds you subscribed to, and write a reflection for your portfolio about how this can be a useful resource for teaching and learning.

5.  After completing all of the activities for this "Thing", take the Post-Assessment of your technology proficiency for this "Thing".

Post-Assess your skills for this "Thing"

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After completing all of the activities for this "Thing", take the Post-Self Assessment of your technology proficiency for this "Thing". (This is part of your hands-on activity/assignment).

Additional Resources

1. Bloglines
2. Pageflakes
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21 Things for 21st Century Educators by CCRESA, IISD, MISD, SRESD is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at 21things.weebly.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://21things4teachers.net/. September 4, 2011