| Lesson 9 RSS & Aggregators Introduction to RSS feeds and aggregators, their use and usefulness. 1) Feedback and discussion from prep (5–10 mins): your Google homepage; your experience of creating a group of tabs as your homepage. 2) In groups, discuss what you think RSS is, who uses it and how. Then watch RSS in Plain English (video; approx 4 mins) and discuss. 3) Using your Google account, open Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader/) and explore the interface. The help pages at http://www.google.com/support/reader/?hl=en (under 'Reading') will help. Practise subscribing to and organising some feeds. Here are some suggestions, but you'll also be invited to share ideas for feeds/good pages:
These are examples: these feeds/pages will provide you with a lot of material relevant to your development and work over your time at St Paul's. In addition, you will, of course, find or be pointed to many a site/feed relating to your academic work: eg, Geography might recommend the Google Earth Blog, Classics already recommends two blogs (see here) ... Practise spotting and subscribing to a blog's feed by using Stephen Fry's blog: http://stephenfry.com/blog/ . Prep: populate your Reader and read it daily. (What are you interested in? What are you studying? What sites — websites, blogs — can you find for each of your interests and for each major area of study? Use Google: search, find, choose, subscribe.) Arrive next lesson prepared a) to show your Reader (explaining what you've subscribed to and how you've organised your subs) and b) to discuss your experience of using an RSS aggregator daily. Either now, or next lesson, you can add your own suggestions for good RSS feeds here - for everyone to share. |