Do the Math

For years, people have gotten up in the morning, grabbed a cup a coffee, and thumbed through the newspaper trying to find some interesting articles to read. In my opinion, this process is quickly becoming history. The reason = RSS Readers.

I recently learned about a piece of technology that is changing the way people read. At the November Learning Conference, I attended a workshop that discussed how reading and writing is changing in the web 2.0 era.

In the workshop, Will Richardson discussed the tools that have brought about the change: RSS readers and blogs.

Instead of thumbing through the paper browsing through the misleading headlines or getting on CNN.com and seeing what their experts are saying, you can now use the internet and an RSS reader to subscribe to certain authors of information (the ones that you trust) or, even better, just certain categories of articles that your favorite author writes.

After trying out this new technology, I am sold that this is going to change the way people find much of the information they read in the future.

A real life example of how this works:

I am an enthusiastic middle school math teacher in St. Louis, MO. I just experienced first hand how the world is evolving changing and how there is a need for the education world to change with it. I want my classroom to be more applicable to and therefore more useful in people’s lives. So I am writing a blog entry about it.

The parents of all of my students that need to be educated about the Web 2.0 era and how it affects their lives and the lives of their children. The problem is, there are thousands of websites about web 2.0 tools. As parents start searching, questions arise. Which of these site  are good at explaining the tools instead of selling the tools? Do they explain why parents should be using the tools also, and why it is good for their sons and daughters to be using the technologies? So what can parents do?

Well, here is where the RSS reader comes into play in public education:

My students’ parents know that I have looked through many of these tools and I am using the best ones in my classroom to educate my students more effectively. So my parents subscribe to my blog. Better yet, my parents sign up for specific categories of my blog so they do not have to read things I write that do not apply to them or their children. My parents subscribe to the category “lifelong learning.”

From the teacher’s perspective:

This is very efficient way to get information that I think is important to my students’ parents, such as what happened in class today and what is new in their children’s world that they need to know about. This seems like a true working relationship between school and home doesn’t it.

From the parent’s perspective:

This is a great way to stay in touch with what is going on in their children’s lives, and a great way to receive some extra technology education from the school also. Can anyone say, “Effective lifelong learning system.”

In my opinion, this process only works if the RSS reader becomes an everyday tool that parents check (just like email).

So, this is when you need to get to work!!!

If you are a parent:

Within five minutes, you can be set up with a free RSS Reader and you can be plugged in to what is going on in your child’s world.

If you are a teacher:

Check out Edublogs.org Within five minutes you can be set up with a blog that you can use to publish blog entries and communicate with you students’ parents.