IT @ ISM Tech Think Blog

Over the last week, a number of teachers around the schools have been visited by an IT teacher offering to explain RSS in twenty words or less and to hook them up with a personalized iGoogle page. The whole process of setting up a personalized iGoogle page takes only about 10 minutes, and it’s been interesting watching people’s reactions, mostly very enthusiastic, as they realize the potential of this tool they’ve been given. If, two weeks from now, you’re still waiting for the muted knock on the door and the polite offer to get you connected, just shoot me an email and it will be arranged. We are getting there - it’s just that there are 200+ teachers in the school and just a handful of us…

But let me just briefly explain why I think this tool is so cool. I won’t go into the details of how RSS works just here (as Mark has done that in a different post), but will rather focus on what you can do with it: an RSS aggregator such as iGoogle allows you to keep your ear tuned to a number of information sources with little or no effort. It’s kind of like not having to go to Glorietta every weekend to buy your groceries and socks and newspapers and some curtains and that latest novel by Nick Hornby you’ve been wanting to read, but instead the shops all deliver to you in the comfort of your own reclining chair as soon as the goods arrive in the shop!

With an iGoogle page, you can subscribe to the information channels you want, and it’s all aggregated for you in your page. In addition, you can store your bookmarks/favorites online so they’re accessible whether you’re at work, at home or on holidays, and you can embed loads of handy tools such as currency converters, language translators, dictionary or wikipedia search boxes, and pretty much whatever else you might want. Teachers and students can also use them to subscribe to very specific search criteria in various search engines, in effect providing you with a tireless research assistant scouring the web and blogosphere on your behalf 24/7 with research questions of your choice.

While this undeniably sounds pretty cool, is it really worth going round to every teacher for? Obviously, it allows people to engage more efficiently in professional reading, but is that all, or are there other, more immediate benefits for learning? (I’m asking rhetorical questions here, so you’ll probably have guessed already that the answer is ‘Yes!’).

Beyond the obvious benefits of subscribing to news sites or blogs penned by recognized authorities in various academic fields, this technology allows classroom members to connect to each other: imagine students regularly producing text - written and spoken - and publishing it on the web, and everyone else in the class subscribing to it all. The role of the iGoogle page is to connect you to these information channels - by subscribing to each student’s “feed”, everyone will automatically receive the latest podcast episode or blog post without having to constantly go to each blog to check. This has a lot of potential, for a number of reasons:

• It’s engaging and fun. Students get excited when they are writing for a larger audience than just the teacher.
• Students care more about the work when it’s not just for a grade - when they know that they are in a position to actually teach someone else.
• Blogs and podcast channels allow for feedback in the form of comments, which turns the monologue into a dialogue. Students students can learn a lot from each other (and when they teach someone else).
• The learning process continues after the school year is over - work posted on the web may well get comments for years to come. At a conference in Shanghai last weekend, Alan November spoke of students who received blog comments from strangers on work they’d posted the previous school year, and who then spent time over the summer rewriting their work to improve it.
• Students writing for a global audience (and not just the classroom) sometimes consider the feedback they get from strangers more authentic - it’s “for real” and not just “for school”.

What the RSS aggregator (e.g. iGoogle) does is to connect everyone so they can listen to each others’ voices. This, to me, is a huge untapped potential in our school.