What is or does RSS Mean? Why subscribe to a blog or a website using RSS? Why might I consider using a Wiki? How do they support collaborative working, and why are they more suitable for this than other technologies such as email? What is Social Networking? How does it relate to the real world? These quirky videos created by commoncraft.com and available both on their site and on You Tube, present in an accessible way, answers to some of these questions but may also be a starting point for thinking around too. I think they make great discussion points for the potential of these tools, in educational settings. Since they are "You Tube" Videos I will not be able to get them through the LA firewall, but downloading them to my hard drive through tools such as KeepVid, they can be embedded and played in smartbooks in their native .flv format. You can also download a free .flv player from the Applian website. If your file download format from keepvid is not recognised, as mine was this morning, then try right clicking it, and in the properties box, adding the extension .flv to the file name.
In working with colleagues particularly they beg questions such as how might readers and feeds be used within school to save time, enable collaboration, communication, celebration, professional development and improve access to new resources and tools? Perhaps as starters we could use them for
- Keeping up to date with developments in other classes across the school, by accessing online newsletters or subscribing to their blogs and podcasts. This could become a regular feature of class community activity, as we develop a shared time to have a round up of news from across our school community. Perhaps by adding an offline reader to our laptops, this could also be integrated into whole school celebration assemblies. Lets see what has been going on in school this week!
- Feeding our del.icio.us bookmarks, so colleagues get updates when new ones are added.
- Subscribing to sites and specific feeds within those sites that support CPD processes, eg Teacher's TV, the SSAT site, Local Advisory Teams, BBC News etc.
The video on using Wiki spaces for collaborative work has potential for discussion around how VLEs and Learning platforms might support changes in our ways of working. Check them out and see. Thanks to colleagues at Wolverhampton CLC for this Link.
RSS in Plain English
Wikis in Plain English
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