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GET RSS


With RSS there are 2 aspects of interest

1. RSS is produced by News services, blogs and other sources of information that is updated frequently.

2. We are going to discuss both. The first that we will discuss is developing a Blog of your own and making your own RSS feeds. The following is a YouTube video created by Google. It is an excellent presentation to show you how the RSS can be set up.

Blogger is a blog publishing system owned by Google. Visit http://www2.blogger.com to start a blog.There are many ways to create a Blog and LiveJournal and WordPress are two common examples that are popular. I have chosen Blogger for this demonstration because I find it the easiest for a beginner to use. If you are not planning on hosting your blog on your school server, hosting at Blogger is more than adequate. If you want your school to host your blog, check with your IT department.

Here is a link to Google Blogger for more help and tutorials to help you develop your blog: http://help.blogger.com/

There are many features to blogs that is not being discussed right now. The focus here is to use RSS. Once you learn how RSS can benefit your teaching or student learning, we will discuss blogs in more details. Right now- focus on learning RSS and how to get any blog post that you do, into your Course Management System.

You will use this feed to update students or communicate with students in several ways. It is up to you as to how you may use this feed or blog. There are many pedagogical reasons for using the blog.
The feed from your blog is what you need to use to create the code for your BB/Vista course. There are several steps to follow.

Blogger allows SMS(Short Message Service which is the text messages from mobile phones) updates and if that is important to you, this may be the blog site to use. You can find other options later as you get better at this.

First you need to create a weblog or blog. I am using Google’s Blogger which I have found to be one of the easiest to start with. If you have one all ready – you can use that. You do not need to use Blogger(but I do recommend it as it has many great features such as the SMS feature noted earlier), but this will be the one I am using in this example. Google’s Blogger is one of the easiest to use, good for beginners and offers many options.

  • Get an account at Blogger. If this is your first time, just follow along and use Google Blogger. You can move to another blog after this if you want.
  • Follow the directions and you will have a blog!
  • The above video will help you achieve this with Blogger. These videos are examples of embedded code from YouTube. We will explore this on another page later.
  • Here is a link to help you set some important features in Blogger so the Feeds work- this site will help you getting your blog ready to work right for RSS and Feeds. Go to: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42662&ctx=sibling
  • I plan to add more about these technologies in the future.
  • Here is a link of a list of many activities related to blogging and education:http://wiki.classroom20.com/Blogging

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