Educational Potentials of RSS Aggregators

My professor in Integrating Technology into Education recently introduced us to RSS aggregators. I had never heard of these before, but I'm glad that he exposed me to them because I can see plenty of possible uses for one in my future classroom.

After learning about RSS aggregators I decided to create a mock setup to see how exactly it could be beneficial in my classroom. The image below is a screen shot of what I created.

Because this was only an experimental layout, I didn't get too in-depth with it, but needless to say, what I found so far was very intriguing. For those unfamiliar with RSS feeds, what they basically do, in layman's terms, is they filter whatever topic you want to search off of the entire internet and pulls all of it into one spot -your page- for you. Teachers could really use these feeds in two ways. They could create a page that the entire class has access to, or they could teach the students how to effectively use one for themselves. For my mock layout I decided to go with the former.

If you look towards the top of my page you will see that I have three different tabs set up, one for literature, one for Shakespeare, and one for writing help. These were three topics that I decided to follow as an experiment for use in an English language arts classroom. I figured that it would be helpful to have a few relative tabs, like "literature" and "writing help," that the students could make use of no matter what time of the year. This way, if my students had a concern in relation to their writing, they could get on our "writing help" page and see if they could find any help with their question. The great thing about these aggregators is that you can search whatever topic you want and find a whole bunch of relative apps that you can throw on your page. For example, on my "writing help" page, I searched for things like "grammar" and "writing essays," and I found some great apps, such as Grammar Girl's podcast and PowerPapers Academic Writing Blog. You can also link whole websites to your page, so I threw on www.dictionary.com and www.thesaurus.com. 

While I was creating these tabs for my students everyday use I started to think about the other types of topics that could be feeds for them, and it hit me that this could be a great source for students to find information on books that we may be reading in class at the time. This image displayed on my screenshot is of a quick tab I set up on Shakespeare. I found some really awesome apps where people read Shakespeare's sonnets and even his plays aloud-- not to mention all of the blogs, news articles, and Google searches that filter in.

All in all, I can see a lot of potential with using an aggregator in the classroom. I just need to spend a lot more time with it and keep exploring all of its functions and possibilities. I do have one concern however, and that's about inappropriate material being filtered in. I haven't encountered this yet, but I need to further investigate the security and parental control aspects of these sites before I ever incorporate one.