Just some more thinking about this school feeds menu thing from yesterday…
Seb notes that he is onto the same track with his students, but that he’s going to give them a .opml file with all the subscriptions in it and then let them decide what to do with it. I think this is a great idea, and when I get my journalists set up next quarter I’m going to do this. I need to start getting a list of newspaper feeds together (or find one.) But here’s the thing…I don’t think that’s such a great idea when it comes to a user base of parents, teachers, community members, etc. I’m not going to be there to look over their shoulders, and I’m worried enough that RSS is going to freak some of them…opml and importing and all that, while not a giant step higher, still feels like it will muddle the issue even more. If I can get the instructions and the descriptions down, I think the route I’m taking my work better for me.
I also think that because I showed a few teachers what I was up to yesterday and even with me there explaining it, I could tell it was a bit of a struggle for them to get their brains around it. But once they did, they were amazed. I mean seriously amazed. My grand plan of creating dozens of Web log sites on our Website and then letting people track them with RSS is finally getting some understanding. And the best part is that they really like the concept, I think. One teacher was on the phone at 6:45 this morning asking me to sit down with him next week and show him this stuff in more detail. “Can I do this from home? Are there poets and authors with feeds like this? Is this free?”
If I can just get about 25 people in this school of over 3000 students and teachers and whatever else to grasp what I have in mind… Yesterday’s show and tell got me my first three.
We had the same experience (a mix of “new understanding” and “spontaneous enthousiasm”) earlier this week with cyberportfolios.
It seems that a good demo of the usage of rss-xml feeds realy helps to understand the “edublogging idea”.