A what, did you say? Yes, an aggregator so we can take advantage of RSS feeds. So many new terms. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. This technology enables someone to subscribe to the content created on a particular blog so they no longer have to visit the blog itselft to get it. Now, that's something I could sure use about now. Up until now I only visited a few family member blogs, and that was when I thought about them. Now, as a class, we all have blogs. Visitng everyone's blog was getting time consuming; technology has a way of doing that, don't you think? And, just when I was getting whinie about all the effort it was taking, along came the assignment on RSS.
The catch is you need an aggregator to collect the RSS feeds. Very simply, it's a site that retrieves the individual posts of information. I chose to use Google Reader because it's already a part of Blogger. All I had to do was click on the bottom of the screen in blogger and it sent me right to the reader. All I needed to do was follow the directions and simply subscribe to the various blogs I was interested in. I was able to organize my blogs in folders. One for class and one for family. I just check peirodically and voila all the new posts come up in one place. Note to family following this blog: You gotta try this.
As a student, I am seeing immediate advantages as I am taking another course dealing with the political system. Tracking the Sotomayor nomination process just got a lot easier. The down side is that there is so much information out there that it's hard know which blogs are valuable to subscribe to. I had a little bit of trouble unsubscribing to a site I thought I wanted until I finally recognized that the symbol I was looking at was a trash can.
As an instructor, how great is this for keeping track of your students' blogs? Only having to go to one site is sure to be a time saver. The text mentions that parents could also keep track of their child's classroom blog. The kids probably wouldn't appreciate this aspect of the aggregator.
There is still so much to explore. I'm sure I will discover more uses for the aggregator as time goes on.
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Hi Ronnie. Well, you're not just keeping up with the Gen Xers, but you are lapping some of them. I talked the other day with a friend that I used to teach with. She's a Gen Xer, and she doesn't have any plans to use any of this technology in the near future. Nice work!
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