Personal Homepages vs. RSS Readers

I've spent the last few days at school, trying to get my new classroom organized before taking one last trip before school begins. Yesterday I spent most of the day getting tech things organized. Cleaning out my Google docs account, setting up a new del.icio.us account for my classroom, and beginning a new blog for the thin walled classroom project that will be the focus of a lot of my time and energy this year.

The other part that is new for me is going to be using iGoogle and having students design a personalized data portal for themselves. While I've written about this several times before, I spent yesterday thinking about the advantages or disadvantages of using one of these pages as a replacement for an RSS reader.

Relatively speaking, students have few feeds to look after. Typically I will give them four of five to begin and ask them to locate another five or six bring them to a total of approximately ten. Using iGoogle, these can be quickly organized into several tabs that might be titled "required reading" and "student bloggers." Students can flip between these two tabs, seeing, at - a - glance, what is new in both of these areas. As well, when needed, they can add more tabs focused on a specific project that will showcase all of the information they will need.

I've been thinking that for many students, a page like this will be more beneficial than using a reader. An RSS reader is not very visual or customizable (except for Bloglines new AJAX start page). As well, using a portal page, a student could add other things such as calendars, a Twitter feed, a photo - of - the day, a feed for a podcast, etc.

While readers may be a necessary option for users of RSS who have dozens or even hundreds of feeds to read and organize efficiently, I'm beginning to believe that a page like this has the possibility to work well in a classroom where students have few feeds to look after and where information can be presented visually or as MP3s instead of only as text and where they have a lot of control over how their feeds are presented to them.

 

technorati tags:RSS, igoogle, classroom

Comments

[bcarrera]

I myself use pageflakes and google reader, but I like the idea of putting individual rrs feeds into a widget for igoogle. I think that pageflakes can do this as well. What I like about pageflakes is the broadcast option of showing your created page to anyone who wants to see it. It could be a way for kids to share resources, ideas, feeds, etc. (Can igoogle do this?)

[kevin]

I don't think iGoogle offers that. I will stick with Pageflakes simply because I can broadcast my pages: http://www.pageflakes.com/dale0/11203447/

they also have a nice template setup at http://students.pageflakes.com

kevin