Thing 6: RSS and Newsreaders

For this activity we were supposed to create an account with Netvibes. Until now, I had heard of RSS feeds and have been a subscriber to a few of them, but had never heard of  newsreaders or Netvibes for that matter. I like newsreaders because they allow you to access so many different resources in one convenient location. I can access my personal email, facebook and twitter accounts on Newsvibe while also being connected to news outlets and my other interests. Some of the feeds that I subscribed to included Cooking Light, Bible Gateway's verse of the day, Edublogs and Urbanspoon.

I think that newsreaders could be extremely helpful in the classroom by allowing students to access a plethora of resources in one location. This would be extremely helpful with researching for projects or papers and I especially liked how you could link your Delicious account to Netvibes. I could see myself creating a public page and having my students access it both in school and at home for their information. We have two research papers that our 9th graders write, so this could be a great resource for the students to use with credible resources.

At home, Netvibes would be easy to use as it allows me to have everything in one central location. Realistically though, I will not use Netvibes at home as I do not like having all of my accounts linked to each other. I do see why people are attracted to newsreaders, but again I do not think that I would use it in a personal setting.

I think libraries could take advantage of RSS and newsreaders for research purposes as well. As technology begins to be used more frequently in the classroom, I can see libraries using these resources more than having paper copies of books, research materials, etc. It would be extremely beneficial because you could also access the RSS and newsreaders outside of a library setting.

Unfortunately I did not realize how to make my Netvibes account public until after I had already created my page and bookmarked quite a few feeds, so I can't add the url to my account. If I have time though, I will create another page so you can see my Netvibes account.