Monday’s Muse by Brenda Branson

RSS and newsfeeds

3. Learn about RSS feeds and setup your own Google reader account.
4. Locate a few useful education related blogs and/or news feeds.

This week’s activity is all about learning what an RSS news feed is and how to set up a Google Reader account which is free, and will allow you to stay of top of all those blogs you want to read.

Before we start, watch this video:

Have you even heard of RSS? Once you discover all that it’ll do for you, you’ll be glad for the time you spend on this activity. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it is a special file format that collects news and information as it is updated and sends it automatically to computer users on a regular schedule. How many websites, blogs, news sites, etc. do you visit everyday? How much time do you spend searching for the sites, the specific articles, following link after link to get to the source? Well… RSS or news feeders will collect all those sources and put them together on one page for you - no need to find the bookmark, search the web. Once you find a site or news page you want to read frequently, you can subscribe to its RSS feed and it will now appear right in your own feed site. It sounds confusing and there is still a lot that I’m not sure about but to set up a Google newsfeed is pretty simple and you’ll love it once you get started.This week’s activity:1. Take a look at Simple Mom’s blog post, Subscribing to Blogs 101 - this a simple and straight forward explanation of RSS feeds.2. Set up an account with Google Reader. There are many others you can choose from but my favorite and the one I’m most familiar with is Google Reader.  Go to the Google Reader Getting Started page and you’ll speed right through this.

3. Subscribe to this blog.

4. Subscribe to several of the blogs that I’ve listed in my Blog Roll on our CCMS Book Bag Blog.

5. Subscribe to a few blogs of a personal interest to you.  You can find lots of great blogs by searching for “blog lists.”  Try Technorati Popular: Top 100 blogs, ODb Top 100 Education Blogs, or just take a look at Edublog’s Bloggers and Awards.
7. Add a blog post about your experience. Do you like the idea of RSS feeds?  How can you utilize the feed for school or classroom use?

Hopefully, you’ve had a chance to read all the posts related to this activity and understand your Itinerary. To begin with, you’ll need to set up your very own personal blog so you can begin to journal your experiences, discoveries, and ideas. For this program, I recommend that you use Edublogs, a popular free online blog hosting service that is extremely easy to use and designed especially for education.

Read some of these blogs:

Creating a blog using Edublogs, takes three steps:

• Create an account
• Name your blog
• Select your template

Once you’ve created your blog here are two important things to know:

• To add posts: The maintenance interface that you will use to add posts, edit or change the step-up your blog is accessed online at Be sure to write down your login and password.

• To view your blog: Your blog address is http://(xxxx).edublogs.com, (xxxx)=the unique identifier you entered in Step 2. Write down your blog address.

If you run into problems or would like more information about blogs and using Edublogs here are some tutorials and video clips you can use.
Muse 1 Activity:

1. Setup a blog for yourself through Edublogs.
2. Select a theme from the choices available.
3. Add a test post or two.
   Note: Use one of your test posts to create an entry about one of the blogs that you read in the first part of this post.
4. Consider writing a brief bio, sharing only what you want to - remember, our blogs are out for the world to see! Or share what you’d like to get out of this program.
5. Enter your blog address on this blog’s page CCMS Blogs.
6. Spend some time playing with your new blog: explore the options/features, try adding an image, or whatever strikes you.
7. Have fun!!!!

IMPORTANT NOTE: How you choose to identify yourself on your blog is your choice. You can blog under a screen name, anonymously, or as yourself.

This venture is an online learning experience that is designed to encourage participants to learn more about Web 2.0 applications in the classroom. These are technologies that are free and available on the Internet - they are changing the way society is accessing information and communicating with each other.

Over the course of the next eight and a half weeks, this blog will focus on “Nine Muses” and activities to help help you become more familiar with blogging, RSS news feeds, wikis, podcasting, online applications, and image hosting sites.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me or stop by the media center. It’s time to get started, enjoy and remember to view this as an adventure, an Odyssey,if you will!

The 9 Muses: “a sisterhood of goddesses or spirits, their number set at nine by Classical times, who embody the arts and inspire the creation process with their graces through remembered and improvised song and stage, writing, traditional music, and dance.”  

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

My  vision of the educational uses of Web 2.0 is similar, in that, the many applications that are now available have “inspired the creation process” in reading, writing, science, social studies, economics, research, communication, and collaboration around the world.   According to Wikipedia, Web 2.0 is  “the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users.”

As part of my professional goal for this year, I am setting up a semblance of a webquest to provide individualized exposure and experience with “9″ Web 2.0 applications that will enhance curriculum and learning in the classroom.  Following the All Together Now and 23 Things models, this adventure will allow you to explore some of the most useful Web 2.0 features and discover ways to integrate them into your classroom learning experiences. This quest will take you on a ten week journey throughout “Worldwide Web” in search of wonderful new adventures.

Yes…look at this as an adventure… it’s more about “playing” and “learning” and “discovering” what’s new in the world of technology.  You’ll find many ways to participate in these activities and will enjoy using many of them for personal and family purposes., as well as, educational practices.  Again, the idea behind this little adventure is to allow the Worldwide Web, our number set at nine, to “embody” the curriculum and “inspire the creation process with” its support through the use of blogs, podcasts, flickr, RSS, wikis, games, tagging, TeacherTube, Google features.

Each Monday, I will post a new activity for your journey.  You will need to record your experiences in a blog, which will be our first activity.  We will begin the week of August 25, 2008.