Not sure why I hadn’t seen this before but FeedBurner has a cool Link Splicer feature where you can automatically insert your Furl or Bloglines Clip Blog posts into your main site RSS feed. I’m just thinking how cool that would be for a classroom.
Say you have your students (individually or in groups) using blogs to collect and annotate links for a project as well as track their time and thinking about the project. At the same time, you have them Furling pages to create their own mini-Webs about their topics. As a teacher, I could watch what they do in both places with just one feed. That would be a time saver, and it might get teachers to think about Furling as a part of the process. Now if we could combine all three into one…throw in e-mail…one feed for everything a student creates online…hmmm…
If anyone’s interested, here’s my blog/Furl feed.
The feedburner-furl combo is nice but a little too limited I think, since it only combines 2 feeds. You may want to take a look at http://groups.blogdigger.com/, should be useful in case you want to follow a group of students that all have their own weblogs, furl-ings, wiki’s etcetera.
Will,
Blogdigger Groups is perfect for what you are looking for. Not only do we offer feeds for your group of blogs, but we have a very nice UI that allows for on the fly filtering and searching within your group. There’s more good stuff on the way as well. Some others in the educational fields have been using Groups for their classes (Alan Levine and Brian Lamb).
Please contact me if you have any questions, I’d be happy to help out in any way that I can.
And thanks to Gerard!
FeedBurner’s ability to generate feeds as animated gifs is useful to get a quick overview of a number of feeds. Create an html page with 3 columns and about 6 rows and insert a FeedBurner-generated code snippet in each ( I change the gif dimensions from 67 by 200 to 86 by 260; leaving them alone allows for 4 or more columns).
Long titles don’t fit in their entirety, but my impression is that this is a much quicker way of getting a handle on what’s going on than using a news reader. Only time will tell whether it’s a good long-term method, though.