Using RSS Feeds

I decided to do the third gallery project, “professional development”. The specific area I chose was technology professional development since I think this is an area of education that will definitely be changing as I progress through my years as a teacher. I found 3 really great websites that had RSS feeds that will allow me to see new updates or ideas for integrating technology into the classroom, which I made public and added as a widget on my blog. For example, one of the blogs gives great ideas on different internet technologies you can use with students, another gives information about different programs that are coming out that can be used in the classroom, and the last resource I found was a forum of teachers with general questions about technology that they could bounce of others.

RSS feeds seem as if they can be used in a number of ways. The most obvious use for me seems to be for keeping track of a potential classroom blog or if students make their own individual blogs, I can then subscribe to those. It will also be helpful for me to continue learning about technology, as can be seen above by the different blogs and websites I subscribed to. RSS feeds could also be used by students—if I wanted them each to stay on top of individual topics to report back to the classroom, I could teach them how to use RSS feeds to get their information rather than spending hours searching all over the internet each time. I could even encourage parents to subscribe to our classroom blog, that way e-mail notifications could be sent directly to them and they would not have to actually go to our blog to see what we were doing—they would automatically be notified, rather than trying to remember to look each week.