Calling on Crowd Wisdom: RSS Feeds for Younger Readers?
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Real quick: When I meet with elementary and middle school teachers next week to share Bloglines as the ideal tool for “extensive, free voluntary reading” that we all know is the key to developing literacy, it would be very helpful if I could show them some feeds that are of a suitable readability level for the full range of readers from K-12.
I’m a high school teacher, so I haven’t explored RSS feeds for elementary and middle school students.
So here’s my question: Can anyone offer guidance about how to find age- and content-appropriate feeds for young readers? Are there any tags or search terms for Bloglines feed searches that will lead to good results?
And while I’m here: I’m about to assign a semester-long Bloglines reading/writing routine to my grade 9 learners. If you’re a teacher of 14-16-year-olds, and have them blogging in your classroom, I’d love to talk about connecting my students with yours via RSS and Bloglines. Let’s connect our students, give them international audiences for their blog writings, and new social possibilities. We can assign X number of “flat school” student blog subscriptions and feel our way from there.
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First, I just want to commend you on both your entusiasm and your thoroughness. What a great read this is. Secondly, I just started a brief correspondence with Nancy Bosch from the Nieman Enhanced Learning Center in Shawnee, KS. She has been blogging with her 4-6 graders for quite a while at http://areallydifferentplace.org, and is herself trying to find the same type of RSS feeds. You might want to check her out. Cheers.
[Reply]
Patrick
14 Jan 07 at 12:39 am
There are a few interesting sites for older elementary that already provide feeds such as National Geographic News (where they also have streaming video and free podcasts),This Day in History from the History Channel, there are several Word of the Day sites that also provide RSS. Time for Kids is great for elementary kids but no RSS - so…try Ponyfish. This is a site that will create a feed for any site without RSS. You can only create 3 without paying for it though. There are other sites that help you create RSS where there isn’t any currently, but Ponyfish is the only one I’ve had time to play with right now. You can find others with a quick search.ht
[Reply]
Diane Quirk
14 Jan 07 at 12:14 pm
One more thing…I also have been letting del.icio.us do some of the work for me lately. I just add a del.icio.us feed to my Bloglines with a relevant tag in the feed. So, if I wanted to get a feed for “elementary” for instance, I add a feed to “http://del.icio.us/tag/elementary”. I’ve been able to find quite a lot of good stuff by creating such feeds. You’re welcome to see what I’ve got at del.icio.us by going to http://del.icio.us/quirkytech.
[Reply]
Diane Quirk
14 Jan 07 at 12:28 pm
thanks much, patrick and diane. i’ll look into those tips and pass them along to the elementary teachers this week.
[Reply]
Clay Burell
14 Jan 07 at 5:11 pm
Nice post! Have you looked at http://www.Feedity.com for custom RSS feed generation.. its much simpler and works really well.
[Reply]
Susan
5 Dec 07 at 11:07 am
If you’re looking for other high school bloggers, my Info Tech students are blogging IT news somewhat regularly at: http://blogs.globalinteractions.net We welcome new members to the group. Also, are you familiar with an Elgg for high schoolers? Youth Voices. It’s quite active and a good read. http://youthvoices.net/elgg/
Madeline
Madeline Slovenz Brownstone’s last blog post..Making use of Podcasts in the ITGS Classroom
[Reply]
Madeline Slovenz Brownstone
14 Jan 08 at 5:38 am