New Media and Education: RSS Feeds

Transcript

RSS (most commonly expanded as "Really Simple Syndication") is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. (Source: Wikipedia)

RSS Feeds are one way to add news to your Blackboard site. Each time a website adds an article, it will be automatically added to your Blackboard page. For example, if you are teaching a class in nursing, you can add the New York Times Health section or alerts to articles from the library databases into your Blackboard course pages using RSS.  Whenever the New York Times or a library database adds a new health related article, it will automatically appear in your Blackboard site, giving your students up-to-date information every time they log on.

Some of the benefits of using RSS feeds:

• It's a huge timesaver.  For example, if you followed the New York Times, Consumer Reports and a particular blog about a unique topic, you would normally have to keep checking all three online resources for updates.  The RSS feed helps you to avoid that by simply pulling out new articles on that topic from all your resources and putting them into one spot whenever they are published.
• It keeps you current on a particular topic or topics. In many professions keeping up with the latest news, data and trends is essential to productivity and success.  For students, it is most helpful when writing a term paper or doing work on a long-term project.
• You can control or filter your own information to a specific topic.  This is especially true when setting up feeds from the library databases.  You can select what databases to use, timeframe [i.e. articles from last 6 months only], whether or not it will be fulltext or just an abstract, your search terms and much more.  Ask a librarian for more information.

Taking Teaching Further: Embed an RSS into Blackboard
4-minute video with written instructions

This in an RSS Feed, created by using the 'Create an Alert' tool that is part of the Madison College Libraries EbscoHost databases. 

It is updated daily, is customizable and editable.  This alert can only be viewed off-campus after students have signed in with a username and password.

Google announced that it's feed reader called Google Reader will be discontinued on July 1, 2013. The below article gives some reasons why this may be.

There are other feed readers available or many now rely on facebook, twitter, or flipboard to bring them content that is most relevant and interesting to them.

Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allow you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use.

A variety of RSS Readers are available for different platforms. Some popular feed readers include Amphetadesk (Windows, Linux, Mac) and FeedReader (Windows). There are also a number of web-based feed readers available. My Yahoo and Bloglines are popular web-based feed readers.

Once you have your Feed Reader, it is a matter of finding sites that syndicate content and adding their RSS feed to the list of feeds your Feed Reader checks. Many sites display a small icon with the acronyms RSS, XML, or RDF to let you know a feed is available. Many will display an orange symbol like the one below to let you know a feed is available.