Monday, January 15, 2007

RSS Feed for Elementary Students

My students started blogging about two months ago. I wanted to have RSS feeds come into our site as an added topic for writing. I started my search with Annette Lamb, a national presenter, who has looked in to all current technology issues. She directed me to her bloglines account. After getting several ideas from her I continued to search the Internet. I felt strongly that the incoming feed needed to be appropriate for kids since I was making a conscious effort to bring the feed in. After all my searching, I found and use the following:

CBBC Newsround -Frontpage
Science Buzz--science
Why Files--science
Cybils --literature/books
Discovery Channel Headlines--science news
Nova Science Now --science news
Patent Pending inventions (blog written by a 15 year old boy)
PBS News Hour --news
Wands and Worlds--fantasy book reviews
Surfing the Net with Kids

The first lesson I learned..."you can have too many feeds"!! Second lesson...you don't want adult news feeds coming in from CNN, ABC, CBS, etc.. Third lesson...the BBC feed has lots of news articles on "football", which my kids quickly figured out...is soccer!

3 comments:

Jane Hake said...

This must be a dumb question. WHY exactly do I want an RSS feed? What will my fourth students gain from it? Do you assign specific assignments based on the feed or is it just more info to expose them to? If you have time, this would be a great blog post for us newbies. If not, I understand!

nbosch said...

Done! Hope it helps.

Unknown said...

Thank you for sharing your experience. I am beginning to design a mobile lap top 'classroom' for my fourth grade son as we begin a year of road school. I have been looking for portable ways to share weekly news feeds akin to this year's hard copy of Time for Kids - the classroom magazine. I'd much prefer for content to be 'pushed' onto our site, than to have to search and wade through subscriber sites, fees, etc. Any more suggestions or recommendations you'd care to offer?