My “Teacher’s Toolbox” workshop concluded yesterday on what I would consider a pretty good note. We didn’t get to Wikis or Webnote or Flikr, but we did dig in pretty deep to Bloglines and Furl. As I told the group when we finished, at the very least I wanted them to leave with an understanding of what RSS can bring to teacher practice and student learning. I think I accomplished that. We’ll see if they keep using the tools, but I’ve already decided to send them an e-mail every day for a couple of weeks reminding them to get in there and poke around some more.
The most interest came from two English teachers whose students are doing research papers. They could see how the standing search feeds could have some usefulness, and they were interested in having me help them set them up for their kids. And I think they all thought the idea of Furling sources and letting their students get those sources via RSS was an intriguing idea. So at least conceptually…
One pleasant discovery was that Looksmart (who know owns Furl) has RSS feeds for the publications in their database and also for searches. (Check under the Articles tab.) Now I know that their archive usually runs about six months behind, so I’m not sure if the RSS feed will bring the new articles as they are posted, meaning it would probably update once a month. As to the search, I put a couple in my Bloglines account to see what happens.
(And, in case anyone is interested, we found out that AllRecipies.com, Bigoven.com, Asian Online Recipes and Real Cajun Recipes.com have feeds for foods…cool!)
Thanks for the tip on the Looksmart feeds. I found about a half dozen ed tech related ones in there. Cheers, Scott