I hadn’t really thought of RSS as a tool for education but it can be. If a student is doing research on a subject that’s in the news it can be useful. And certainly it’s useful for me. During the last week I’ve spent a lot of time reading articles online. In class we were asked to get an acount at Bloglines, which I did but I recently found another RSS aggregator that I like a lot better, called Netvibes. I have used the live feed feature of Firefox too but Netvibes is more visual. You can move modules around and it’s like a browser page that you can set up tabs on, so for instance I have the main tab for news feeds, weather, etc and a second tab for blogs about online education.

Here’s a screen shot of my main page at Netvibes (click to enlarge):

You can see (well actually I guess you can’t see all that well. I’ll fix the screenshots tommorow) I have a module for my del.icio.us bookmarks there, which is pretty handy. Also a to do list which I have been using to jot down what groceries I have to pick up on the way home (not that that means I’ll actually remember what to get by the time I arrive at the store) It’s a little more involved to add a feed, you have to have the URL of the site you want the feed from all copied, but I like this much better than Bloglines. I mean look at the contrast between the way they’re set up.

Bloglines main page:

To read at Bloglines, you have to click the feed, then the stuff appears in the right side there. Well Netvibes gives you a little preview of the story or blog post or what haveyou and when you click the link the story opens in a separate window.

Anyhow, I just think it’s far superior to Bloglines. I have a separate tab with feeds to all the class blogs as well as some blogs pertaining to online education and related technologies.