Thing 5

For about 30 minutes or so, I thought I wasn't going to be able to subscribe to any RSS feeds.  I opened the first site, Will Richardson's, only to not have the tools at the top of the screen to subscribe.  I scrolled down, went to each tab, and nothing.  I went back to 23 Things to see what I had missed and couldn't figure it out.  I went on to the next task, coping the URL into the feed with David Warlick.  Again, no luck with that either.  I then started playing around with Bloglines to see if there was something that I was missing.  It turns out that my Internet browser doesn't show the RSS feed subscription icon because there is another way.  I am on a new MacBook and I had to drag the "Sub with Bloglines" tab to my bookmark bar.  Once I did that I was able to subscribe to the first two blogs, no problem.  Here's the funny part, the third video of the lesson was on just that feature for all Internet browsers.  I was trying to do them one at a time, when all I had to do was watch the third video and I would have been all set.  That's OK, though, I had to figure it out and I did on my own.  The video just confirmed that I wasn't losing my mind.

Now to answer the questions: RSS can be a difficult concept for some to grasp right away - what questions do you have?  What didn't work or doesn't make sense?  How might you use RSS in your personal or professional life?  Find anything in your searching that you would recommend to others?

I guess I already answered the second question with my subscription woes.  It was frustrating, but I was able to trouble shoot my way through it.  One question that I do have is: is bloglines only to subscribe to blog RSS feeds?  Can I subscribe to other sources with that as well?  I'm going to give it a try to find out.  Also, I know that bloglines will not email to say that things have been happening on my feeds, which is both good and bad.  I would like to know if it's worth my time to go there to see the feeds, but I know that I would be inundated with too many emails.  I guess that means I better subscribe to the ones that matter so I will go check on a regular basis.

Personally, I might use an RSS feed to subscribe to things about school stuff or about my hobbies, etc.  For my husband, he's more into the news features than I am, so I might sign him up as well.  Professionally, I would use it for technology and school media related topics.  Something that I would like to do with my students is to get them subscribing to the various databases and places of information for research purposes.  I know a teacher librarian who does this with her students and she just loves it.  I am hoping to steal her idea and try that out in the classroom.

I would recommend http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com/ and http://blog.schoollibrarymedia.com/.  Both are great resources of inspiration for educators and school media.

CR