RSS in Education

Last week we were asked to think of how we could use RSS feeds in our classroom or place of business.  I thought that I could use this technology to solve a problem I have in my Grade 12 social studies classes.   I lose classroom contact with these classes during our final exam week.  In the past, I would create a website to act as a study resource.  With RSS feeds, I can take this idea further and have my students subscribe to a "study blog" which will allow them to review on ongoing basis rather than cramming for their exam.

This week I decided to put that plan into action and create a blog for one of my social studies classes who have an exam coming up.  I structured this blog to have a review activity in every post.  In fact, I scheduled  some posts to publish over the next week so the students won't have all of the review activities at once.  To satisfy the requirements of this week's artifact, I included a video tutorial on how to subscribe to its RSS feed and how to use Feedly as an RSS reader.  I introduced the review blog to my students and they seemed receptive.  I am  positive that this will work quite well, and I plan on monitoring the page views each post receives to gage the effectiveness of my idea. I will be looking for a correlation between the page views of the posts and the how well the students do on the corresponding concepts of the exam.

I learned quite a few things creating this artifact.  I learned how to create a script/storyboard which proved to be very helpful.  I learned how to make a screen cast which is something I wanted to do for quite some time, and I learned how to use RSS and incorporate it in my teaching.  I am noticing that my classmates and I are  showing considerable growth and we are becoming more comfortable with the technological tools introduced to us since starting ED Tech 501.  I appreciate being able to use what I am learning in this class at work with my students.

Here is the video tutorial I created for my students.

If you are interested, you can access the blog I created for exam review here.