RSS in Education

Learning about ways that educators are using RSS was an eye-opening experience.  Prior to this module, I didn't even know what RSS stood for.  I'd seen the little, orange RSS icon millions of times before and never even thought twice about it.  I had no idea that something that could make my life so much easier was literally a tiny orange icon that I had overlooked a million times while I was reading articles on the NYT and NPR.  Needless to say, I installed Feedly and am now addicted to it.    

RSS in Education was a tough assignment!  I initially thought about ways to use RSS with the students I teach: international students who are completing their freshman and sophomore years of college.  After playing with several ideas that I thought would not be very effective for use in the classroom, I switched gears and thought about my colleagues, who like me teach academic reading and writing using a content-based language teaching methodology.  Consequently, I decided that my target audience would be my colleagues rather than our students.  As I mention in my video, one of the most time-consuming parts of teaching content-based ESL is searching for reading materials to supplement the themed units in our textbooks.   My video tutorial explains a way to simplify this search by using RSS to collect content from newsfeeds and blogs and to organize the content to coincide with each of the themed units in "Q:Skills 5 Reading and Writing" (a content-based textbook that many ESL writing teachers use).

I have to say that learning about RSS and ways to use it in education was not nearly as difficult as creating the video tutorial using Camtasia Studio 8 as this was my first real experience with video editing software.  I chose Camtasia since I have had, literally, about 30 minutes of prior experience using it at a faculty development workshop, and I thought that that tiny bit of familiarity with the program would help me somehow.  I was wrong.  The only aspect of Camtasia I was familiar with was the name "Camtasia."  

I apologize in advance for any editing "issues" my video has.  

Here it is: RSS in Education