RSS in Education

As I first began learning more about RSS (Really Simple Syndication), it was a bit overwhelming. The amount of information was a challenge to sort through. As I started to get more comfortable with RSS and navigate my way through setting up my Digg Reader account, I found it to be quite useful and a big time saver. By using RSS and my Digg Reader, I can subscribe to all the current blogs I want to follow and easily decipher through the feed and have quick access to news I want to read. You can watch my embedded video below, or click here to see how I set up my Digg Reader. I found that some of the blogs I already visit on a regular basis were much easier to access through my Digg Reader. This way, all the information I wanted to read was in one convenient place and I no longer have to visit each blog I want to look at individually. Before learning about RSS, I always subscribed to every site that sends an email to update me about what’s new. After subscribing to so many, the emails start pouring in on a hourly basis. This is impossible to keep up with every day and creates thousands of unread emails. With RSS, it eliminates the problem. I can view my Digg Reader feed and easily see what I want to read now, later, or not at all.

After spending some time setting up my Digg Reader and subscribing to some new blogs, the real challenged began. How would I integrate RSS into my second grade classroom? I struggled with this concept thinking it would be much easier to achieve in a higher grade level. Then I got to thinking about how many devices I have available to my classroom and ran into a blog that was easy to integrate into my primary classroom. I developed a lesson plan to meet the second grade standards on how animals are suited to live in different habitats and how they adapt to their surroundings. The lesson plan includes a link to a question/answer sheet the students can use while completing the activity. It is set up so that my students can access the RSS feed and blog through our class Symbaloo account on any device. Next, they can easily access the short videos to watch and fill out their activity sheet to prepare for our small group and class discussions on how living things change their environment and defining the word adaptation.