My thoughts on Chapter 5 of "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts"

        I want to start off by saying I found this chapter to be a little confusing. Although I did understand the basic concepts of an RSS, the various steps it described in the chapter made it look like an RSS would be A LOT of work. This did turn me off a little bit to using an RSS, but not entirely. I did find the basic concept to be very interesting. I know I personally have various websites that I continue to check on a weekly or daily basis & it would be very helpful if all of these websites be in one place. Especially as a future educator, there will be helpful teaching resources on the web & I can easily see myself getting overloaded. On the other hand, like I mentioned earlier, the steps to using an RSS seemed confusing. If I were to ever use this in my classroom I would have to be sure to create & seriously start using an RSS way before I introduce it to my students. If it something that seems confusing to me, it will probably be even more confusing to my students.

One thing that really attracted me to using an RSS, or having my students use an RSS, relates back to me previous post. In my previous post I talked about how I would like to do a class research project in my future classroom. I would like to display the information found for this research project in a class wiki. One very helpful tool that my students can use for this project would be an RSS. If I introduced my students to this resource, they would be able to find more relevant & reliable information for our class project.

Another way I can really see myself using an RSS in the future would be with student blogs. I have been thinking of having my students each create their own blog. An RSS would be an extremely helpful tool to keep track of all 25 or 30 blogs, rather than having to go to each individual website each day. Using an RSS, I can easily see what posts were added & when. I would also like to have my students blog or comment with students around the world. Therefore, my students can each have their own RSS to track & follow the different blogs they will be interacting with.