I got an e-mail from a teacher yesterday asking for some tips on where to find appropriate RSS feeds for K-12 teachers to use in their classes, and he said he’d had little luck finding a site that collated them all together. I hadn’t really poked around very much on this, but I think between the feeds from Moreover, (which actually has a feed on “firearms industry news“), coupled with the even more refined Moreover feeds you can find at Syndic8, and those listed at Weblogs compendium, there’s certainly enough to get started. But even in these three there are a lot of newspaper feeds that aren’t listed. My big question is whether or not there’s an “Ultimate Feed List” that’s collecting all of these into one place…
This approach, while perfectly understandable, seems wrongheaded to me. The way to find appropriate RSS feeds and other web resources is by reading and writing weblogs. Of course, you don’t get all the information at once, but then again, you can’t assimilate or contextualize all the information at once anyhow. The fact that gathering information via blogs is an ongoing conversation is a feature, not a bug.
It was me that wrote the initial private note to Will. I have some examples <http://tll.prn.bc.ca/rss/antarctic_rss> of using RSS feeds from learning object repositories to dynamically build resource lists for teachers and students. I see the value in Weblogs for sure, but I am looking for feeds from sites that have other types of learning resources that are appropriate for the k-12 sector. Things like recent news in science or technology, but appropriate for school age kids.
Tom, I think that what a lot of teachers want to do is experiment with the research aspect of RSS separate from the blogging experience. I know that I would feel more comfortable being able to provide feeds from more traditional sources (of which there are more and more) since I can’t really be sure that Weblog content is going to be appropriate for my kids. I know that a regular reading of a particular author could dispel a lot of those fears, but there is a time issue. And while I love the conversation part of blogs too, I think now that so many other sources of information are jumping in the ring, we need an index of some type to keep track of all of them.
SciencePORT.org is a new scientific NewsFeeds directory. Besides scientific and educational Weblogs, you will find other Websites which offer NewsFeeds in RDF, RSS und Atom format.
http://scienceport.org