Week4Thing8

I have a much clearer understanding of what RSS is, that's for sure! I've heard of RSS for a long time and even used a it a bit, but really didn't see the purpose or potential until going through some of the videos and tutorials. One of the reasons I don't "surf" for news and points of interest is because of the time involved. Now there is a solution to the time issue! I'm still trying to completely get the hang of the "subscription" process, but it's coming. At one point I tried to subscribe to a blog and somehow wound up putting it on my Microsoft Feeds instead of getting it sent to Bloglines. I haven't tried Google Reader yet, but will have to at some point to see if one is easier.

My url for bloglines is: http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1&id=s_lfsears@clarion.edu

I'm wondering how to get a website to become RSS-feedable. By that I mean, if I wanted to make my library's homepage subscribable to patrons, how would I go about it? If this was touched on in any of the information this week, I missed it. Anyway, I think it would be great to be able to have patrons subscribe to the library website so they could be notified of updates, changes, and new information posted.

In considering other uses for school media centers, I think it would be great if students could subscribe to feeds that pertain to their classwork. I see it being especially beneficial for political science/current events classes. If students have assignments dealing with news and world events, they could subscribe to news feeds and/or topics pertaining to their studies.

Last semester, I had a bit of personal experience with RSS. For the Database Searching class, I used RSS feeds to notify me of new articles that were published on some of the databases I was searching for the final project. If students began a project or paper enough ahead of time, this is a viable use for high school as well. Some of the ACCESSPA databases offer this type of service. Obviously, it's not going to be useful if a search is generated the night before a paper is due, but given some weeks a student could be notified of new articles and information that might be pertinent to his project.