I’ve written before on the blog about the power of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) in allowing us to automatically receive new content from our favourite websites:
For some time now, I’ve been using Google Reader in combination with iGoogle as my web homepage. This allows me to collect together all of the content that matters to me (newsfeeds, email, del.icio.us favourites) in one place for easy access.
Yahoo Pipes is a service that takes managing your feeds to a new level. By allowing you to combine together multiple feeds into a single feed, you can effectively create your own view of the world, based on the topics that interest you. Imagine Pipes as like having your own personalised magazine delivered to your door every day. Pipes also gives impressive levels of control over the feeds - you can, for example. filter feeds on particular criteria, reorder feeds, truncate feeds and so on.
A primary school teacher with a class blog on edublogs, class del.icio.us page to store web links, and Flickr account for photos, can remix the RSS feeds from all of them with the newsfeed from the school website (and from a podcast on the history topic they’re looking at that term) into a single feed for their students. What’s more, the teacher can modify the mix as the priorities and topics for the class change each week. Such a “mashup” of content makes particular sense if the students have a handheld device each with which to track the changing landscape of their online learning . . .
Here are some aggregated feeds I made that might interest readers of the blog. To use these feeds, click on the links and copy the address into your feed reader of choice (e.g. Google Reader):
City Learning Centres aggregated feed
This feed combines together items from the websites and blogs of City Learning Centres from around the country. If you work in a City Learning Centre, and your feed doesn’t appears to be included here, submit a comment on this post with the url of your feed, and I’ll add it in.
ICT in Education aggregated feed
This feed combines together information from a number of informative and inspiring blogs and podcasts related to the effective use of ICT in Education, with particular emphasis on primary teaching. Includes content from ICT in My Classroom, ICT Inspirations, the SmartBoard Lessons podcast, The Classroom Displays blog and the Redbridge Primary ICT consultant blog.
Wolverhampton / West Midlands / Wolverhampton Wanderers feed
This feed gives Wolverhampton / West Midlands news mixed with news from Wolverhampton Wanderers! It uses content from the Express and Star, BBC, and wolves-mad.co.uk.
