The letters RSS stand for ‘really simple syndication’. Hold on to those first two words and you are well on the way to understanding how this powerful tool can help you focus on the things that are most important to you as a busy school leader.
The purpose of RSS is to ‘feed’ to users, information that is specifically of interest to them via the media they find most valuable.
You can:
- regularly receive news updates on your own sector issues.
- download the latest episode of an audio or video series you are following.
- be informed whenever a new item has been added to a specific area of the web site.
What do you need?
A computer or any other device that can connect to the internet. Many mobile phones are now equipped with RSS software.
‘Feed reading’ software. The latest version of Internet Explorer includes a feed reader as part of its functionality. Alternatively here are a few feed reading packages that are available free;
How do I ‘subscribe’ to a feed?
Whenever you see the RSS symbol:
a feed is available for subscription. The methods for subscribing vary depending on the software. For instance in Internet Explorer 7 it is simply a matter of ‘clicking’ on the RSS icon. Other software allows you to ‘drag’ the icon with your mouse into the reading software.
The most reliable way of doing this though is to click on the RSS icon. This will open a new page, which will often contain some fairly confusing text. However, in the ‘address bar’ at the top of the screen is the address of the RSS feed.
Highlight this text with your mouse and press ‘ctrl + C’ on your keyboard to ‘copy’ the address to your computer memory.
Go to your feed reading software and choose the option to ‘create a new feed’ and click in the area that requests the address of the feed.
Press ‘ctrl + V’ to paste the link.
Press ‘enter’.
Your feed software should now update with all the items in the feed and enable you to access or download them as you wish.
Podcasts
Podcasts are a special kind of feed which consist of audio and sometimes video material. They enable you to ‘subscribe’ to that material and download it to your desktop or mp3/multimedia player.
Some of the most popular software for this purpose is again freely available. Two of these are:
- itunes
- Windows Media Player
The subscription process is very similar in both cases to that described above for web feeds.
