RSS, Social Bookmarking, and Media Sharing

Follow me at EARCOS
FYI: It's my Spring Break this week and I will be in Kuala Lumpur doing presentations at the EARCOS Teachers conference. Just know that I'll be out this week if you are looking for help...try your network. :)

That being said if you have time you can follow me throughout the conference as I plan to stream my presentations live on the Internet. You can check my blog for more details. Also, handouts for all four of my sessions can be found here. http://thinkingstick.wikispaces.com/EARCOS08 This is another wiki site called wikispaces. I like wetpaint better, but it's blocked in China :( so I have to use wikispaces to get any work done. Hopefully once I move to Bangkok next year I can move all this content over to wetpaint. I'll be on twitter most of the conference so be looking for updates there on what I'm doing. OK...now back to your regularly scheduled course. :)

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Google Spreadsheet
You should have received an e-mail from me with a link to a Google Spreadsheet that is your 'grade sheet' for this course. This is where I will write down the assignments as you complete them. If you have not received this link or you would like it at a different e-mail address please e-mail me and I'll send it where ever you want it. :)

Google is an amazing program. Seeing that you have a Google account already I strongly suggest that you play around with Google Docs. You can upload any Word or Excel to Google Docs and then edit them there or even share them with others. Others can either be viewers (like you are to your grade sheet) or Contributors where they can add and change the document. Google has also just added Google presentation which I haven't had a chance to play with yet but from what I hear it's pretty good. There is also (released about 4 weeks ago. Google Sites which is suppose to be their wiki. I'm excited about this tool and look forward to playing with it as well.)

So think about this for a minute. A free web based Word Processor, Spreadsheet, and now Presentation software that you take with you where ever you are connected. You can share with whom ever you like collaborate on projects/papers and even publish them when you are finished or download them as a Word or PDF file. How does this extend our teaching? How does this tool alone change a networked classroom? What does this mean for schools who cannot afford the licensing fees of Microsoft. As my wife likes to say "Google is Goog!"

RSS
So you have been playing with your RSS reader (Google Reader) for a couple weeks now. Some of you have posted about it on your blog and how easy it is to use and how it helps you to manage your information. Again what RSS does is change the flow of information. Instead of you going out looking for information...information comes to you in one central location. Again Google as taken this one step further recently by releasing Google Gears. After installing Google Gears you can download your Google Reader to your laptop. Therefore you do not have to be connected to the Internet to read your information. For someone like me that has an hour bus ride to and from work...this just made my ride that much more productive.

RSS is really starting to catch on with other sites besides Blogs. Most newspapers now offer RSS feeds not only for the newspaper but for specific sections to the newspaper. So for example I subscribe to the Seattle PI RSS feed for the Seattle Mariners and only receive updates that deal with the M's and not the whole paper. Think of the trees I'm saving...and the fact this is where I usually go anyway when I pick up a newspaper. :) In fact...for better or for worse I have not read a hard copy of a newspaper in almost 3 years. But I have a stream of news coming in from different papers all around the world on the topics I'm interested in.

RSS in the Classroom
How can this simple tool also affect the classroom? Let's look at one example of how RSS could help you or your students with a topic. Let's take the topic Global Warming. We're going to use Google (Yes I think they are amazing!) News and do a search for the latest articles from around the world that talk about Global Warming.



Here is what I got:




So now lets look at these results. First the green arrow points to the number of articles that include the words Global Warming. The blue arrow shows from where in the world this news article is coming from, and the red arrow points to the RSS feed.

So think about this for just one second: You have over 29,000 news articles from over 4,500 newspapers around the world (according to Google) and once you do this search and add the RSS to your reader you will be continually updated with the latest news articles from Google's News search. You now have the topic of Global Warming coming from different perspectives around the world. The UK looks at it differently than China than does the US. Think of the conversation you could have in your classroom.....if you really want to stretch this into a High School subject, think about current events and searching for something like War in Iraq. You now have different views of the war from different countries....mind blowing cool if you ask me! Don't forget this is a one time search....add the RSS and the updates come to you!

Social Bookmarking
OK...so let's move on to Social Bookmarking. Delicious del.icio.us (somebody was thinking on that one!) is probably the most popular. I also use Diggo. The nice thing about Diggo is that when you bookmark something with Diigo it will also bookmark it to my delicious bookmarks at the same time. For the purpose of this class we'll be looking at delicious. Will Richardson does a really good job of explaining how these social bookmark serves work and to truly understand them you need to understand tags.



I'm going to encourage you to use tags on your blog posts. Blogger calls them "labels" why? I don't know...the world calls them tags and that is really what they are.



You can see from the picture above that when you add labels to a blog post that they show up at the bottom of your blog post. At the same time there are blogging services that are watching blogs and categorizing these tags. Technorati is probably the most popular. You can go to Technorati and when you put in a search term it looks for all the blog posts with that tag. Now social bookmarks work the same way. When you save a bookmark in delicious you tag it with the words that make sense to you. You can then go to delicious and search for web sites based on what people have tagged. Oh and did I mention each tag comes with an RSS feed! That's right...go to delicious search for the tag "podsafe" and scroll to the bottom and you'll see an RSS feed for that tag. You can now add that to your RSS Reader and find when new sites are found that have music on them that can safely be used on podcasts.

One of the down sides to tags is that there are no rules to tagging. However there are some commonly followed practices...as I see it anyway.

1. Try to put words together...especially names. You should tag anybody's name you use in a post like is: jeffutecht
2. Think of tags as categories and you can use more than one. So if I was going to tag this page I would use. rss, socialbookmarking, mediasites
3. You will find that you will come up with your own tagging system soon...although you'll also find that it will keep expanding...and that's OK. Here is the tags from my blog and that's not all of them...that's just all I could fit on the screen at one time. (BTW jingproject.com is what I use to take pictures of my screen...great program!)



Below is an image of what you see when you are posting a blog with steps (on the image) of how to create a hyperlink. Please remember to hyperlink to anything and everything that is linkable possible (I like that!).



Media Sharing
I'll let you explore and think about the use of these ones on your own. :)


YouTube
TeacherTube
VoiceThread
My Schools YouTube account (Just to see how schools can/are using YouTube)

Oh ya....all of these sites have RSS feeds too. :)


Readings

• Google Reader
• Richardson: Ch. 5,6,7

Assignments:

• Blog Topics
• RSS
• Social Bookmarking
• Media Sharing