Helping out others with technology

Ever thought to yourself "I really wish that I could support my friends/colleagues/parents in using technology", but know that you don't have time to walk them through every detail on how to perform certain tasks (ie. copy & pasting). Well, you're in luck. With Google's Teach Parents Tech, you can now take a very few minutes to send helpful videos to walk them through a wide variety of tasks from changing your screensaver to re-sizing pictures.

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are great ways to keep up to date on information from various sites and sources. They stream information live to your own personally built lists so that we have a collection of updated information on topics that interest ourselves. Commoncraft videos have a great video explaining more on RSS feeds.

The real question is, how do I display this information in a way that could engage my students in discussion or activities? The way to accomplish this is to display these feeds for your students to see, either on your website, or within Moodle. just by copying the RSS feed link. For example, CBC has a great set of feeds, so we copy the one that we want (ie. http://rss.cbc.ca/lineup/topstories.xml)

Websites like www.surfingwaves.com allow us to quickly and easily create widgets to display this information by creating HTML code that we can copy and then paste into our online spaces.

The only down side to using an RSS feed is that you have no control over what content is posted by those sites, so please be cautious and use only reputable sources for your RSS feeds.