Saturday

#9 (WEEK 4) Locate a few useful School Classroom and Library related blogs

Now that you have an RSS Reader (your Bloglines or Google Reader account), you can begin adding other feeds that interest you. There are several ways you can locate RSS feeds:
  • When visiting your favorite websites -- look for RSS feed icons that indicate the website provides it. Often a feed icon will be displayed somewhere in the navigation of the site.
  • Use Blogline's Search tool - Bloglines recently expanded search tool lets you search for news feeds in addition to posts, citations and the web. Use the Search for Feeds option to locate RSS feeds you might be interested in.
  • Check out the top "Edublog" award-winning blogs and school library blogs.
Other Search tools that can help you find feeds:
  • Topix.net - This search tool allows you to locate recent newsfeed items based upon keyword or phrase searching. The tool focuses specifically on news and media outlets RSS feeds for information, not weblogs
  • Syndic8.com - Syndic8 is an open directory of RSS feeds that contains thousands of RSS feeds that users have submitted.
  • Technorati - Technorati is a popular blog finding tool that lets you search for blogs. Since RSS feeds are inherent to all blogging tools, Technorati Blog Search can help you find RSS feeds for topic specific blogs you may be interested in.
Google Blog Search - See what appears when you search "school library learning 2.0" and “Classroom Learning 2.0”

Blog Pulse - Tracks conversations (try putting CSLA 2.0 to see who is talking about us)


Discovery Exercise:
  1. Explore some of the search tools noted above that can help you locate some news feeds.
  2. Create a blog post about your experience. Don't know what to blog about? Here some questions to think about ...Which method of finding feeds did you find easiest to use? Which Search tool was the easiest for you? Which was more confusing? Did you find any feeds that were not useful? Did you find any unusual ones? What other tools or ways did you find to locate news feeds?
Suggested "tags" or labels: RSS, news feeds