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For educators, the potential significance of RSS is huge. Think about how
teachers and districts could use this syndication process to communicate with
students, parents, newspapers, etc. In the classroom, teachers who have students
create their own Weblogs can easily keep tabs on what those students are posting
by subscribing to their students' feeds and simply checking their aggregators
regularly. If school Web sites were built on a foundation of Weblogs, as with
Lewis Elementary, parents could "subscribe" to different feeds that are relevant
to their children ... say, the feeds from the College Search page, the Board
of Education page, and Mr. Richardson's homework page.
Similarly, if internal committees used Weblogs to post minutes and links,
administrators could do a quick read in their aggregators to keep abreast of
what the groups are up to with the added benefit that the work is easily archived
for retrieval at a later date. Or, if you teach, say, a media class and want
to stay abreast of the latest developments with the Federal Trade Commission,
you can even subscribe to a Google or Yahoo! search for that term so that any
news on that topic is delivered right to you.
More and more Web sites are creating RSS feeds for their content. Many major
newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The
Miami Herald, and others, now offer RSS feeds of major sections in their
papers. Magazines are following suit. And sites such Feedster and Amazon.com
allow for the creation of RSS feeds for searches. So, for instance, if you
are a librarian and you want to be notified when new young adult books are
released, just add the Amazon.com-young adult books feed to your aggregator
and sit back and wait for the notices to start arriving. Or, if you are a classroom
teacher who wants to stay current on the newest tools in educational technology,
just create that search at Feedster, subscribe to the results, and any time
anyone in Weblog land writes about that topic you'll automatically know about
it.
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