Rss Feeds

The first feed I looked into was Flipboard.  I had a friend that used it so I figured it was a good place to start.  The idea behind Flipboard is you create your own “magazines” based on what you like.  It’s like having your local newspaper, favorite magazines, and blogs all in one magazine.  Flipboard is made for portable devices like ipods and ipads.  I like the fact that I can create my own magazines with everything I usually search for on the Internet.  However, I had a hard time finding less well-known blogs.  For example, I never was able to find our blogs created by our groups.  I was able to find some of the teacher blogs I currently follow that have been around much longer.  I love the way you “flip” through the things you have marked and the layouts.  I do not believe though that this would be a good place to aggregate student work.  As I mentioned before, it was hard to find some blogs and wasn’t always easy to use.  I think I would use for personal use, but not for school.  The only thing I might use it for in school would be current events.

I then searched and searched to find something new that was easy to use and that no one had written about.  I found Old Reader to be just that, old.  I felt like it looked a little dated and didn’t catch my attention.  I really like the look of Pulse, but found it hard to navigate.  I tried and tried to have it follow blogs I wanted to follow, but couldn’t figure it out. 

In the end, I found both Digg Reader and Feedly the most user friendly and the ones that would be most easily used in an educational setting.  I have taught 2^nd grade for five years so when I reviewed the RSS readers I needed something that was basic enough for what I might use it for in the classroom.  Both of these seemed simple to manage, organize, and accessible.  I was able to use my ipad and navigate them with ease.  I feel like student work could be easily placed on my boards and I could follow any number of students easily on both my laptop and my ipad. 

In the beginning, I really had no idea what RSS was about.  I enjoyed experimenting with it and like being able to follow all of my blogs via an app rather then dealing with emails every time someone posts to a blog I follow.