I struggled with this idea for several days. As a special education teacher, my initial instinct is to look at the idea of using blogs in the classroom as a "extended learning" tool rather than a "meat and potatoes" tool that has become the center of what I do for my students.
One idea that I thought of as I was playing with the aggregator sites is to have the students set up their own readers that would feed the blogs about topics they were interested in. That way, if we had some down time, they could log into their RSS feeds and do some reading on a topic that is interesting to them. It would be great reading practice, it manages itself by constantly updating, an because it is always changing yet stays on the same topic, the students will never get bored with it (at least in theory)
This sounds like a way to introduce fresh ideas while keeping the students interested by allowing them to receive feeds from areas that match their interests. The challenge I would forsee would be monitoring the feeds. Do you have the time and a mechanism in place that would let you preview each feed before the students see what is coming in? If not, what steps will you/can you take to ensure they do not receive innapropriate material? Since they are high school kids, I'm sure there is much more leeway. But if a kid is interested in something like Criminal Justice, for example, you might possibly run the risk of them receiving graphic crime scene details. Or someone interested in film could get an explicit script or a clip with profanity. It seems like there would need to be some content monitoring. Or do the feeds have a way during setup to keep out inappropriate material?
ReplyDeleteI too am a high school teacher and have considered using RSS feeds as part of the classroom learning environment. I am concerned about network safety and content. Fortunately for our school district, we have a very rigid set of rules written for our firewall that prohibits and blocks inappropriate material from the students. On occasion, something might "slip" through the firewall, but this becomes a classroom management piece and as long as the students are made aware that the potential for inappropriate material might show up on their screens, they are to simply close out of the window, or risk getting in trouble. In my lab, many of my students already have blogs and RSS readers to look for material from other subjects and share ideas with their classmates. They have been using this technology for a long time, and we need to jump on board with them and start using the technology as part of our curriculum.
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