Week 4 Part 1

I added some RSS feeds to my Google Reader. I didn't know I had Google Reader already set up. The blogs that I have signed up to follow were already there. Stranger things have happened before. I have subscribed to RSS feeds on my home pages. I have the Librarian's Internet Index, my local paper, The Frederick News-Post, and the WhiteHouse.gov feeds. I also subscribed to feeds through my outlook email on my home computer.

Instead of having feeds everywhere, I decided to import those feeds from Outlook email to my Google Reader page. Before I could import those subscription, I had to export them. I learned how to export those RSS feeds to an OPML file saved on my computer and then uploaded them to Google Reader. Then I deleted the feeds from the Outlook email file. I have a subscription to Twitter/ALA Graphics, Microsoft At Home, Microsoft At Work, the Frederick NP Daily Updates/Breaking News, the Frederick NP Local News and the Infinite Thinking Machine. I may change some things and move the feeds from my home page to Google Reader to streamline my information sources and clean up any duplicates.

What do I like about RSS and newsreaders? I like that the information comes to me. I have so many bookmarks that I have multiple files for those bookmarks. There is just so much information out there. Thank goodness for RSS feeds. How can libraries use RSS or take advantage of this technology? I don't know that too many teens would subscribe to a library RSS. If teachers are using technology in the classroom, there could be some really creative ways to incorporate RSS and newsreaders. As much as educators say technology is so important to integrate in school, the biggest problem is that teachers are not as tech savvy or maybe just have no idea how to work this in when they have to prepare kids for teach for testing. I don't know of too many teachers that have had the time to really think through this when they are so bogged down with curriculum, testing and meeting adequate yearly progress (AYP). I do see where librarians can collaborate with teachers, but I think teachers have so much on their plates that they really need someone to have a detailed plan how to initiate using RSS that they can easily implement..