Ok, so this isn’t revolutionary, but it’s kind of a neat application of Furl that I really hadn’t thought of. (One of those “Doh!” moments.)
The journalism 2 kids here have their own blogs and Bloglines and Furl accounts. As they write their stories, they’re Furling all of the relevant pages they find. So, on each of their sites, we’re pulling the RSS feed from their Furl archive into the right hand column, so anytime someone Furls something, it automatically shows up on the page. No biggie, I know. But the cool part is that as the kid Furls the site, he blogs it, meaning he annotates it, writing about what the potential use and relevance the information there has to his story. So, he’s got a handy reference right in front of him as he plans the story.
Now, if we could just have them tag the pages in del.icio.us and then push those feeds to the left column while importing relevant feeds for photo tags from Flickr…
How can you say that this is no big deal? What you are doing with these kids is nothing short of amazing. I have spoken at a couple conferences since this past December (I’m in Ohio) and not a single teacher that I have spoken to has even heard of Bloglines or RSS!! And these are tech conferences–full of instructional technologists and innovative teachers. When I read this post, I don’t think “this is lame, everybody’s doing that.” Instead, I get excited to have learned about another inventive use of technology