RSS Wrap up

After two weeks of regular checkups I am ready to review my experiences. I will give you the pros on cons of my experience and share with you my ideas on how I would incorporate this a learning situation.

Pros:
1. Very easy to learn and use. If you have an active email account, you can literally have your aggregator up and running in minutes!
2. RSS will eventually save you time in your internet routine. I say eventually because it will take you time to set up your RSS station to it's optimal setting. I know when I first set mine up I added too many gadgets. At the time I added them I thought they would be very useful and I would check them. This ended up not being the case. It will take some time to explore all the RSS feeds, podcasts, and blogs and figure out which you will end up keeping.
3. The sky is the limit. There are very few websites out today that do not feature an RSS feed. The power of the feed is limitless once you have your base station.
4. Customizable. You can customize your igoogle to who you are. There are countless themes for layouts and you can even create your own!
5. On the go. You can log into your igoogle or reader from any computer with internet connection. It's not like an email client where you may have local folders saved on one computer and you're working on another and need to access those emails. With RSS, you can save it all online which means you can access it from anywhere.
6. Up to date with the new way of keeping in touch. Many businesses, organizations, newspapers have their own feeds. This is the way we communicate in the future. You are considered tech savy if you have your own rss station and know how to use it. You can interact with the author of the blogs you read very easily doing this.


Cons:
1. Can be very addictive. This may not happen to everyone, but for me I spent more time than I should at the beginning picking and choosing the layout of my RSS station. It added some time to my morning internet checking routine.
2. Information Overload. This too may not happen to everyone, but for me I was amazed and overwhelmed at the amount of information I was being sent daily. It is important to have a way to organize your RSS station so you don't run into this problem. Anyone with any helpful hints, hit me up!

RSS can be used in a learning environment in many ways. Like our own class, a teacher can keep track of all their assignments on a blog that the students can track using google reader. With all the RSS feeds available I am sure students could find some that pertain to the subject that they are taking. It would be very easy to find current events for your social studies class, podcasts or tutorials on how to create a webpage for your web design class, wood shop tip of the day for woodshop class, or as Paul already does in his P.E classes, have an inspirational quote of the day.