Continuing the Technology in Modern Foreign Languages Series, Joe Dale outlines the many possibilities RSS has to offer educators, not only in terms of teaching and learning, but also research and professional development.

I’ve always believed that ICT should not be used for the sake of it, but only when it enhances traditional methodology. One of the highlights of the noughties for me was the discovery of RSS and how it can be used in so many ways to nurture one’s personal learning network. For those people who don’t know, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, which is basically a delivery mechanism for subscribing to frequently updated content on Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, podcasts and wikis, etc.

In simpler terms this means that instead of remembering to visit your favourite websites to find out the latest news, the information can come to you and be read all in the same place through an RSS reader. This seems to save a lot of time and improve productivity as a result.

Right, but RSS can do so much more than just that. In the next few minutes, I plan to share with you some of the gems I have discovered by reading my feeds in the last few years and I encourage you to try some of the ideas out for yourself.

OK, so the first idea is a site called Podcast Pickle and if you’ve got your own podcast you can create a player which you can then put on your blog. So basically you take the audio podcast RSS feed which you could get from say a website like Podomatic, which gives you 500MB of space for free and you can just upload your podcasts on to there. That will then generate the embed code that you need to post the player on your website.

So, essentially, this will allow others to listen to all of your episodes in the same place on your blog rather than having to subscribe to the information. They can just go to your blog and press play on the individual episode and every time you update a new episode it will appear on the blog. That’s the great thing about RSS, it’s dynamic.

OK, another idea I’ve come across with RSS is Feedburner and in particular Feedburner chicklets, which are the little bits of code that you put on your blog which then tell other people how many people are reading or have subscribed to the RSS feed that you’ve created. So that’s really cool because you know how many of your blog’s readers are subscribing. You don’t actually know how many people are just going to the website because they’ve just found it using a search engine or what have you, but you can actually quantify how many people have subscribed.

Now when I say subscribed, that doesn’t cost any money at all. Sometimes when I talk about this sort of thing at conferences etc people get the impression that you have to pay. Well, it’s absolutely free and I think in the present sort of climate, of certainly in England of people finding it more and more difficult to get out of school because of the Rarely Cover issue, I think that RSS and taking control of your own CPD, your own continuing professional development is really important.

So I’d definitely suggest that you have a look at Feedburner to create your own chicklet. Another thing about Feedburner is if you’ve created let’s say your RSS feed through a website like Podomatic then Feedburrner will allow you to, if you like, create another version which means that if you then change the host feed that you have, the original feed you’ve set up and create another feed, but use the same Feedburner feed, then your content will not be changed which is a fantastic tip I found out from a great podcast called Podcasters’ Emporium which is two guys from Australia talking about podcasting and the particular episode on that is episode 17 called Feeding your audience which has great information not just about Feedburner, but RSS feeds in general.

Another tip I would give about RSS feeds is in relation to YouTube. Searching for content on YouTube can be very time-consuming. However, it is possible to create an RSS feed to display any recent clip which has been tagged with a certain keyword. For example, I used to be a languages teacher so I might be interested in Key Stage 3 topics, say the family. By putting in “famille”, the French word for family into the RSS feed that I create, it would mean that anyone who has tagged a clip with the word “famille” will then appear in my Google Reader, which is a really great way of finding content.

In addition, you can subscribe to someone’s YouTube channel by creating your own RSS feed which in YouTube itself is not actually possible. You can subscribe to somebody’s YouTube channel, but you can’t generate an RSS feed which will then go into Google Reader.

Another way of using RSS for researching is using Google Alerts which is fantastic for finding about topics of interest or individuals who are writing interesting blog posts etc and by going to Google Alerts and setting up an account you can either choose to subscribe via RSS or via email and if you have a Google Reader account already you’ll automatically send that feed to Google Reader. So it makes it easier to find useful links online for topics you’re interested in and it’s a fantastic way of researching for up to date information which comes to you instead of you having to go to it, as it were to find it which saves a lot of time.

RSS feeds are also a great way to keep in touch with the core group of people that you follow on Twitter for example, in particular Twitter. Twitter is a great way of creating your own personal learning network. The disadvantage is that, if you are following 1500 people let’s say, there’s no way that you can read every single tweet that they make, every single message that they send.

Therefore if you want to follow like a core group, what you can do is go to the Twitter Search website, put in the username for the person you want to follow or track and then create an RSS feed for that username. Put that into Google Reader and as a result, you can see anything that they send as long as their tweets are not protected and also anyone who replies to them. So that’s really good. It’s also a great way of meeting like-minded colleagues as well.

OK, finally, I discovered a few days ago I could create an RSS feed for my friends’ updates on Facebook, which has been possible in the past, but Facebook tend to change their security settings from time to time, which sometimes makes this not possible, although it is possible at the moment. So, hopefully, that will continue for a while and it means you don’t have to log in to the site. You can just find out what your friends are up to on Facebook by having the RSS feed straight into Google Reader or straight into your RSS reader. So that’s really cool.

So, to finish off with, the challenge now is to spread the news about the power of RSS and to show how effective it can be for enhancing learning in the 21st century.

Joe Dale

Top photo by jintan

This post is tagged mfltech, RSS