RSS in Education

Whilst I'm not a big fan of voicing over the movies I create as my accent is very nasal, generating this project reminded me of a couple of things: 

• trying to record in a soundproof room can be difficult as the wifi doesn't penetrate so well
• don't record in school near the end of a lesson as the bells go off right in the middle of your video!
• Making a small verbal mistake can be fixed afterwards in editing so don't just bin the minutes worth of recording  I've just done; keep going!
• Making lots of small cuts stops me rambling as I can prepare a sentence or two and say them with ease
• I say "ahhhhh" far too much! Its a good job I could edit them all out.

I am a lot more comfortable creating captioned screencasts using Adobe Captivate. The program recognizes the buttons you press and automatically creates a caption that can be edited. It also creates simulations with animated mouse tracking. Dealing with the verbal errors almost doubles production time compared to the auto-captioning Captivate allows.

This video was the second I produced as I made two. The first was ten minutes long and included how to insert RSS feeds into Blogger and a Google Site. I decided trying to show how to use RSS and how I use RSS feeds were different tasks and since there are tutorials all over the internet on how to set up a RSS reader, I went with the latter and made the five minute limit!
If you would like to look at my first video attempt, here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4OShnYrFbM

I currently use the RSS aggregator built into Microsoft outlook and I have to agree with  +Bryan who mentioned in his reflection about there being too much information to keep track of. That being said, I would definitely miss the information if I had to regularly visit the different sites I subscribe to; at least they are in Outlook and I can look at them offline when I want.

Over the next year I will be using a Google Site and a Blog with my students as they write their Reflection Diaries as part of their target setting. I think I will trial the various options for alerting me to their posts and updates. I like getting email notifications when things are changed on the sites I 'watch' so comparing Google Site's change alert with email updates from the blogs and RSS feed updates should be interesting.

I know that many tutorials mention that our consumption of RSS from a website is anonymous, I am sure that if a website designer really wanted to know who you were they could do it when you click the RSS button on their page. This page was interesting: http://www.feedforall.com/measuring-rss.htm

Boise's Albertsons Library: http://boisestate.worldcat.org.libproxy.boisestate.edu/oclc/4598406564

Pence, L. E., & Pence, H. E. (2008). Accessing and managing scientific literature: Using RSS in the classroom. Journal of Chemical Education, 85, 10.)

Mart.