ABCs of RSS

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This is a Screencast on "RSS Feeds and Live Bookmarks in FireFox"

Just what is RSS and how can it be used in education? Depending on who you talk to, RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication. Either way, RSS is an important technology that information specialists and educators would be wise to harness.

RSS is a type of Web Feed. Unlike conventional sites which rarely change their contents, blogs (online journal) are usually updated frequently. In order to keep up with what's happening on blogs, there are 'web feeds', 'feed readers' take the content from selected blogs and deliver it to you, all in one place. This means you can scan and select new and updated material without checking blogs all the time.

Web feeds are just a special kind of web page, designed to be read by computers rather than people. They deliver new stuff directly to you as soon as it is published online. You can subscribe to receive new stories and headlines instantly, rather than having to look for the latest updates online. The 'news' can be any kind of content - articles, essays, images, music, video... Subscribing to web feeds is also known as 'syndication' or 'aggregation'.

It uses a type of software called an "aggregator" or feed collector to check the feeds you subscribe to, usually every hour, and collect all the new content from those sites. In other words, you check one site instead of 30 — not a bad trade-off for a harried teacher.

This Blog has been set up with an RSS feed, so you can subscribe to it and receive the blog posts automatically on your computer in "Fire Fox" (add live bookmark) or in Blog Lines. Also check Donna's site on RSS