I’ve written on the blog before about the use of newsfeeds (see ‘Working with RSS Feeds‘). As the internet expands with more sites, and, more importantly, more interesting sites, it becomes increasingly difficult to stay up to date with the latest news and additions on your favourite websites. Newsfeeds allow you to receive syndicated content from around the web, so when a new piece of news or piece of content is added to a site, you can be notified automatically without having to visit each site in turn to check. You may have noticed icons like this - 
or 
- popping up on websites; the RSS or feed symbol (or sometimes an ‘XML’ or simple ‘newsfeed’ link) tells you that a feed is available. (For more details see ‘Working with RSS Feeds‘).
FeederReader (www.feederreader.com) is a great piece of software that allows you to receive newsfeeds on a PDA (PocketPC). This is possibly even more useful on a PDA than on a desktop PC, as some websites render improperly on the PocketPC, but a newsfeed is an unstyled piece of content made up of text and images. FeederReader also allows the user to receive files attached to a newsfeed item; notably audio files in the form of podcasts. A free version of FeederReader, limited to monitoring a maximum of eight feeds at a time, is available to download from the website.
In this article, I want to look at:
- How to use FeederReader to receive newsfeeds and podcasts
- Some ideas for use of newsfeeds and podcasts in education
For FeederReader to work, you will, of course, need an active internet connection, so activate the wireless connection on the PDA; a simple way to check that this is working is to launch Pocket Internet Explorer and check that you can browse the web.
Every newsfeed on the internet has an address. You typically find this by clicking onto the RSS or icon or onto a link labelled something like “feed”. The page that opens, will tend to look quite dull; something like this:
How many people, I wonder, have been put off by strange-looking documents like this? (In some cases, the feed page will have some styling, but the following principles still apply). However, the important information here is the address of the feed itself. (For example, for the CLC Blog, this address is http://blog.wolverhamptonclc.co.uk/feed). It is this that we enter into FeederReader. Click onto Tools –> File –> Add RSS Feed, then, into the text-entry box that appears, type in the address for the feed. The screenshot below shows the address of the CLC Blog newsfeed being added into FeederReader:
Once a newsfeed has been added and downloaded (which may take anthing from a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on your connection speed), the feed will appear in the list of newsfeeds. Click on the (+) symbol to the left of newsfeed name to view the post titles from the feed. For newsfeeds without attached files (known as “enclosures”), you can now simply click onto the post title, and the message and any embedded images will open up for viewing:
Podcasts
A podcast is a special type of newsfeed in which the posts also include attached audio files. You can think of a podcast as a subscribed audio service; you subscribe to the podcast feed (by entering its address as described above), and then, when new audio material is released, it will be downloaded automatically to your computer or PDA when you open your newsfeed reader (e.g. FeederReader). When FeederReader detects that a post has an attached audio file, it cleverly adds a new toolbar beneath the post:
(For a detailed description of the functions of the buttons in the enclosure toolbar, visit http://www.feederreader.com/EnclosureSupport.html). FeederReader can be set to automatically download enclosures or to download only when manually instructed to do so by the user; see the FeederReader manual for details of the extensive options. The icon beside each message (and the % figure by the podcast filename at the bottom of a message) indicate whether the audio file has already been downloaded; here are some of the icons and their meanings:
or
?- The audio file has been downloaded and is ready to play
or
- The audio file is available to download. Click onto the 
?icon to begin the download.
Once an audio file is downloaded, click on the play button to play the audio file in the media player on your PocketPC:
Ideas for using newsfeeds and podcasts
The potential uses of newsfeeds and podcasts on PDAs in an educational environment are varied and exciting. There are new educational newsfeeds and podcasts appearing on the internet all the time; see http://recap.ltd.uk/podcasting/index.php for examples of educational podcasts. The ability of a newsfeed to rapidly communicate information to many individuals at the same time means that the need for synchronisation of individual PDAs with an admin machine may be reduced. More importantly, however, because newsfeeds can be created automatically from blogging platforms (e.g. WordPress which this blog is based on) or image-sharing applications (e.g. Flickr), newsfeeds can be used to actively share projects and ideas created by learners with each other and teachers. Of course, the implications for data and child protection need to be carefully examined, but within a moderated framework, the possibilities for learners to construct their own learning and to communicate this with their peers are very exciting. Here are a few possibilities:
- Publish photographs from a school trip to the zoo onto a class Flickr account. Every student could then, using the Flickr newsfeed, view these photos and copy them into a PocketSlides presentation. The class teacher could set up a Del.icio.us account of links relevant to the trip, and students could subscribe to a feed of these links for use in their presentation.
- Teachers use a blog to send ideas, homework, or images to the whole class.
- A class blog of learning experiences with contributions from learners, distributed to the whole class (or in the case of the Learning2Go project, all of the school students involved across the city of Wolverhampton!)
The possibilities are endless!
A Flickr images newfeed open in FeederReader
Podcasting and blogging projects will continue to be an important part of the CLC’s work over the coming year; keep checking the blog and our website for more details.
Web-links
- FeederReader - www.feederreader.com
- FeederReader manual
- BBC Newsfeeds help - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/rss/default.stm
- Educational podcasts - http://recap.ltd.uk/podcasting/index.php
