In an effort to minimise inbox overload, and in response to your great feedback, enthusiasm and determination, I have decided to dedicate this blog post to you.

I agree with the comments Arabella Hay made in a recent email to you all;

“…you are all doing a fantastic job and thoroughly enhancing the skills and knowledge of your Faculties and Campus’s….”

“…it’s time now to consolidate, refresh and explore embedding new ideas and practices. So, perhaps entering a different phase with a different ‘look and feel’… ”

Accepting the role as a Faculty or Workplace e-Learning contact is a massive commitment considering how busy you all are. I am aware that you are all devoting more hours to this project than allocated and I am seeing some wonderful blog’s, wiki’s, Del.icio.us pages, Moodle Courses, etc as a result. I am also getting some great feedback from teachers, head teachers, faculty managers and our Institute Director about the wonderful support and work you are all doing.

So thank you all for your effort and hard work so far!

Welcome to Phase 2

Arabella has succinctly captured your feedback in the comments above. Having taken your feedback and suggestions on board, we are now busy preparing for Phase 2 of our project.

Let’s revisit some of the technologies we have explored to date and focus on ways to embed these technologies (as appropriate) into your Faculty or Workplace. In addition, let’s explore a couple of tools that you can use to engage colleagues in using the technologies you have explored so far; Jing, Bridgit and Adobe Connect.

I hope you’ll join me next week for the first Technolog-e session of Phase2.

In this session we will create quick some demonstrations that you can upload to your wiki/ blog or email to your colleagues, using the program Jing (you will need to download and install Jing prior to this session – you may require the HelpDesk for this).

We’ll follow this up with some Adobe Connect training for you, and we will use these sessions to look at ways to further embed the technology you have already explored. Technolog-e Session Schedule

Times

It’s always going to be hard finding times that suit you all. So I invite you to make some selections on the survey below. The most popular times will be selected.

This form was built using the Web2.0 tool Wufoo, it’s a great tool, easy to use web based form builder. It’s well worth signing up for a demo and using on your wiki’s and blog’s! Have a look at some example forms here.

<a href=”http://flairandsquare.wufoo.com/forms/whats-the-time-mr-wolf/” title=”HTML form”>Fill out my Wufoo form!</a>

Please feel free to leave a comment on this blog.

So what is RSS and how can it be used in education?

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication.

Either way, RSS is important technology that information specialists and educators would be smart to harness sooner rather than later.

As a teacher you may find a heap of Weblog and media sites on the Internet that are consistently publishing interesting and relevant information for you and your Keeping on top of these is nearly impossible.

RSS feeds allows you to do get all of this information in one place by using a type of software called an “aggregator” or feed collector. The aggregator regularly checks the feeds you subscribe to and collects anything new from those sites you are subscribed to.

Then, your aggregator (such as netvibes, bloglines, SharpReader) displays the individual stories, which provide a link to the full story if you want more info.

Here are some examples:

• Moodle – when you force your students to subscribe to a class forum, an RRS Feed icon appears at the top of the forum. Students can use this link to receive updates directly into their RSS Aggregator of choice or directly to their browser.
• It can work the other way too, if you have 20 – 30 students posting their work to a wiki, blog, flickr or other site, instead of checking all 30 sites, you can subscribe to their RSS feeds using an aggregator and view it all from the one place.
• If you use Weblog software (like Moveable Type or Manila) you can import RSS feeds into pages you create for your or your students’ sites. While it takes a bit of code to make it work (there is plenty of help for doing this on the net), the benefits of bringing topic specific feeds into student (or teacher) work spaces is something worth exploring don’t you think?
• For more examples of RSS Search Feeds, RSS Feeds for News Searches, RSS Feeds for Weblog Searches, RSS Feeds for Website Searches, RSS Feeds for News Group Searches, RSS Feeds for Other News Outlets, RSS Feeds for Bookmarks or Combining RSS Feeds – have a look at this RSS FAQ for Educators.

For more detail/ examples, have a look at this site.
This Guide will also be really helpful – RSS Guide by TeachingHacks.com

Check out netvibes…

What is netvibes?

Netvibes is an RSS Aggregator. It automtically reeds RSS web feeds. Compose your start page the way you like it…

With netvibes, all your digital life fits in one page. Blogs, news, online videos, podcast, pictures, e-mail: pick your favorite service to create your netvibes page.

Have a go! See it in Action

1. Go to netvibes
   
2. Copy an RSS Feed URL from any site (eg. TeachingHacks.com)
   • (Firefox users) Right click and select Copy Link Location
     
   • (IE users), click the icon and then copy the URL from the address bar at the top of the browser
3. Go back to your netvibes page and click on the Add Content link
   
4. Click Add Feed
   
5. Paste in the URL that you copied, into the Address section (above) and click Add.
6. The latest posts to this Educational Web Tools Blog will now appear, automatically on your netvibes homepage. click for larger image
   
7. From the new ‘pod’, you can click the item to get more info, or go to the site itself.
8. That’s it. Everytime you see the RSS feed logo on a webpage, you can follow the same steps. In fact, I have set mine up to give me the Forum posts as students & teachers reply to them.

Sometimes you’ll see the netvibes button on news sites, blogs and other information portals. By clicking this button, you are subscribing to the RSS feed for that site. You can subscribe to this blog by clicking this;

Add TeachingHacks.com to your netvibes page by clicking below;

Once you have an account, click the button below to share my Technology in Education netvibes tab;

Click to Vote for this Article – My StumbleUpon Page