Week 5: RSS and Google Reader

What a great TOOL!!! I can't believe how much easier RSS has made my life online. Having all the webites that I frequent in one place like 'bookmarks' is one thing, but being able to organize the feeds that you get into your Google Reader saves so much surfing time that I have more real life time with my family.  What I like best about the Google Reader is the ability to build and organize folders for all of the feeds you subscribe to becuase what I found after a week of finding RSS feeds, was that they all fell into 4 or 5 categories. Even if the page didn't have an RSS option, just by cutting and pasting the URL into the 'Add a Subscription' button in the upper left hand corner of the screen had Google make a feed for that page to notify you of any changes to the pages.
Musical artists, online streaming concert sites and concert touring sites went into one of my Reader folders, so if any updates were made to pages of my favorite artists were made, I was pushed the info right away. The same went for all the other sports, language arts, even united discovery streaming sites that I frequent at home and at school were all there in my Reader. If I didn't want to keep the feed, It's easy enough to delete. I really like the way that Goggle makes up nice blocks of information for you in the Reader, complete with headlines, graphics and links right at your fingertips. Even for the pages without true RSS feeds, Goggle does an amazing job at creating great, reader-friendly previews of the updates made to your favorite sites.
Having students organize there own interest through RSS feeds and Reader pages could really help me bring their literature circles to cyber-space. ALl it would really take would be for the students to create a gmail account, then create a Blog on Blogger about the book their group chooses. Then, each of the group members could subscribe to their other group members to answer questions about the novel, share ideas, and offer insight at their own speed. Even if it was something that only a few students could do at first to try out, it seems like a medium that would appeal to all of them.