Uses+of+RSS+and+Social+Bookmarking+for+Educators

=Overview:= For educators who are looking to use Web 2.0 Tools to expedite and streamline their professional practice, RSS and Social Bookmarking are invaluable tools. Read further to learn what exactly RSS and Social Bookmarking are, why an educator should use them, and how they are currently being used by some educators.

What is RSS?
Depending on who you ask, RSS can stand for either "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary". Both of which are just fancy names for a way to get all your favorite web content delivered to one place, so you don’t need to repeatedly visit sites looking for updates. The updates come to you! RSS can also be described as a feed that one can subscribe to. Depending on which feed you're viewing, RSS feeds will include the title of the article, a small excerpt or even the whole article. A few examples of the endless amount of content you can get with RSS include: news, blogs, forum posts, saved searches, and journal tables of contents. (1, 2)

RSS Feed Readers to Use

What is Social Bookmarking?
Want to have all of your bookmarks in one place online? Want to be able to access them from any computer? Then Social Bookmarking is for you. You can also organize your bookmarks by labeling them with tags. Tags make it easier for you and anyone else viewing your bookmarks to find exactly what you want. It's also possible to add notations to each bookmark, and create a basic annotated bibliography. One important note: keyword searches and tag searches vary from site to site. When performing a keyword search, you are searching the entire content of the bookmark, including the title and notations. However, when you click on a tag word, your search will only give you items that have been tagged with the same word.

By searching for a certain tag, you can see what others are bookmarking in a topic you interested in, such as "English Literature" or "education". If collaborative research is your thing, social bookmarking is a great way to share your own bookmarks with others in the same field, or alternatively, among a group of individuals studying the same material. (1, 2)

Social Bookmarking Sites to Use

Combining RSS and Social Bookmarking

** Why Should an Educator Use RSS? **
Educators have an amazing opportunity to access the latest news about their profession by using an aggregator, such as [|Google Reader], [|FeedDemon], or [|Bloglines]. This aggregator stores and disseminates all the RSS feeds to which an educator subscribes in one place, rather than having the subscription part of the selected websites send an email each time something new has been posted. Teachers have so little time to keep up-to-date that it is essential to have their news feeds available in one place. Upper level educators could also easily use RSS feeds with students, to read/discuss the latest science news or current events.

[|RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators]

Social bookmarking on sites like [|Delicious] affords educators the opportunity to house all their professional websites in one online space. This is a remarkable way for teachers to share resources online, rather than emailing links to each other. Not only can a teacher save a collection of subject-specific bookmarks, but s/he can also share them with colleagues, and see what other teachers are bookmarking as well. Educators are far less likely to miss a potentially great resource to use with their students if they take advantage of this type of bookmarking. If a teacher does a keyword search, finds an acceptable resource, and saves it to "Favorites", it is very possible that another teacher might approach an online search differently, resulting in the discovery of another site. Using social bookmarking assists teachers in finding all the relevant information based on multiple searches, not just their own.

References:
1) ED 5023 Vocabulary List. [] 2) [|http://www.pop.upenn.edu/resources/RSS.html]University of Pennsylvania. March 11, 2008

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