What is an RSS Feed and why do I care?

[Cyndi Danner-Kuhn]

Teachers from the Trenches:
I think my students are having a difficult time understanding RSS feed and why they are useful and important. If any of you has a good explanation or link that you could share, we would really appreciate it. Also why tags are necessary and important. Thanks

[Nancy Brodsky]

I have a video posted on my Classroom 2.0 page that could be useful! RSS in Plain English

[Adelyn]

I just logged on to mention this link. I am glad you posted it. It is an awesome "low tech" way to explain RSS. There is also one about Wikis (Wikis in Plain English) that is really good.

[Sylvia Martinez]

It's hard to see the importance if you are working in a small group - since you want to see everything. One way to look at RSS and tags is simply a way to cut through massive amounts of information, so they really don't become important until you have "too much".

RSS creates a stream of information from one specific place, like a favorite blog, and it comes to you no matter what the subject (tag) of the day is. Sort of like RSS is the library and tags are the dewey decimal system. If you just "RSS" your local library, you will get a notice of any new book that shows up there.

Tags are the home-made coding system that spans the entire Internet. Like the dewey decimal system, it works in all libraries. But tags are made up by people as they go along.

You can create an RSS feed based on a tag, which is probably where the confusion comes in. Again with the library, it's as if you are asking all libraries in the world to send you any new books on "politics" (the tag) and they came in the mail (RSS) automatically.

Tags aren't just for other people to set and you to search on. You can create them to suit your purposes. Like if you had students in groups, and each group tagged their project posts with a specific tag. Each student could find every other student's post for that group automatically, even if you were using different blogs, wikis, YouTube, Flickr, or shared bookmark sites. As a teacher, you could set up your RSS reader so that anything tagged from the groups came to you, and sorted itself into nice neats piles.

[Cyndi Danner-Kuhn]

Thanks for the quick replies. I think they will help!!!

[Jill Whitson]

I watched both the RSS and Wiki in Plain English and they were very helpful in helping me to better understand. I think it helps me to see things explained also. Thanks for your help!