This morning Tom Daccord and I are introducing a group of educators to RSS, Google Bookmarks, Diigo, and blogging. I like to start with RSS because it then gives us content we can use for social bookmarking activities. One of my favorite resources for introducing RSS continues to be Common Craft’s RSS in Plain English (embedded below).

And, of course, one of my favorite resources for introducing social bookmarking is Common Craft’s Social Bookmarking in Plain English. (embedded below).

Applications for Education
Some of the ideas we’ll share this morning regarding RSS is to keep up to date on the sites and blogs you use for professional learning. We also discuss the idea of creating folders in Google Reader in which you subscribe to a set of blogs that you want students to read and sharing that folder with students through email or a widget on a classroom blog. For example, if every student in your classroom has a blog that he or she maintains you could create a folder that contains all of those blogs’ feeds.

The reason that we introduce teachers to online/ social bookmarking services is for the fairly obvious benefit of being able to access your bookmarks from any computer. More importantly we introduce teachers to sharing bookmarks with other professionals and with students. By sharing bookmarks everyone can benefit from a community’s bookmarking activities.