Using RSS effectively to GTWO (get the word out)
Submitted by Brett Hinton on March 26, 2007 - 5:49pm.
NOTE: If you are not familiar with RSS you really should be, check out these links to learn more about this great technology, (PDF warning)here and here.
One of the ways I think we can get the word out is by aggregating interesting, valuable articles (via RSS) on our main CoreWEB resource site and in some of the online professional development courses we are running with our teachers. By putting relevant information in places that people already frequent, we get greater likelihood of click-thru. This is especially true of teachers, who are notoriously a curious bunch. The effect of this can probably be accentuated as we restrict the display of articles to items relevant to what the user is currently viewing.
An example of my efforts in this regard came as I was working on an upcoming 30-hour professional development course we will be launching (about Moodle-we refer to it as Virtual Classroom). I was wondering what valuable RSS feeds could be included in the course that highlight Moodle "good teaching" practices. Of course there are the Moodle forums, but what I was looking for was really more blog-focused. It's not that the discussion forums aren't valuable, they are. But what I wanted to expose my teachers to in this course was well-written, comprehensive ideas, techniques, and tips for using Moodle effectively with students, as opposed to the more lengthy, conversation-style format of the Moodle forums.
Unfortunately, even with using Google blogsearch and technorati I didn't find anything that stood out. From that experience, then, came my decision to post weekly an article about best practices for teaching with Moodle (open to other's comments too) that is targeted at the classroom teacher using Moodle. I will be tagging my posts with teaching and moodle tags so that in technorati these combination of tags will be subscribable.
Look for my first post in this regard (i.e. Moodle teaching strategies) coming later in this week (after Thursday-which is the launch date for our 6-week Moodle training program). I would also love to have other Moodlers contribute so we can all benefit from that great things that I know are going on out there-just tag your blog entries with Moodle and teaching and technorati will take care of the rest. I'm also going to check the blogs hosted on Moodle.org to see what might be available there.
Education RSS Feed
Google Reader can help
Submitted by todd (not verified) on April 1, 2007 - 1:55pm.If you hate Reader this won't help you, but I've found it to be very powerful. I subscribe to lots of feeds in Reader, and when something I want to share with a particular audience pops up, I tag it with an appropriate tag. I can share out individual tags, and I just use the google widget to embed the headlines on another webpage. I prefer this to just referencing a technorati tag because I find those vulnerable to spam and duplicate entries. Also, since I'm doing the filtering, I assure that only quality stuff gets shared. It's not more work for me since I'm monitoring these subjects anyway.
You can probably do the same thing in bloglines if you prefer it.
That sounds like a great
Submitted by hintbw on April 5, 2007 - 4:54pm.That sounds like a great idea. I use Netnewswire as my blog aggregator, but hear more and more great things about Google Reader. The concept of tagging blog posts I like and having them hang around and be able to publish them sounds really neat (I don't think I can do that through Newsgator's integration with Netnewswire).
I kind of loathe giving up my client aggregator to go with Google reader but I might have to give it a go again.
Great tip.
--Brett