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May 31, 2020

More RSS: News, Podcasts, Padlet, etc.

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You can use any RSS feeds in Inoreader, which means blogs and also other RSS sources like Diigo. In this post, I'll provide a quick overview of some other places you are likely to find RSS.

And remember, if you can find the RSS, you can make it part of your content network at Inoreader, which means you can then export that content out to other web spaces like inside your LMS, your course website, in a blog, etc.

News Sources

 News sources often have RSS feeds, and they often have specialized feeds based on the different content areas that the news source includes.

Just as one example, our student newspaper, the OU Daily, has an RSS feed: OU Daily RSS. I can subscribe to that feed in Inoreader, and have that display inside Canvas LMS, etc.

I could also create a folder with different news sources; for example, here is an education news folder I use in my Inoreader:


One way to use news sources like this is to curate a stream of special interest to your students. So, for example, you can scan through the news articles in a folder, and use a special tag to indicate items of interest to your class, and then having that tag be the stream that appears in your LMS or in your class website.

Podcasts

Podcasts are basically blogs with audio enclosures! So you will find that many podcasts offer RSS feeds. A quick search of "podcast" for feeds that people have subscribed to already in Inoreader returns over 4000 results. That's a lot of podcasts! :-)


Not all podcasts will have easily discoverable RSS feeds, but if you have a favorite podcast and they have not made the RSS feed easy to find, contact the podcast developer. They probably can give you the feed address. If not, your inquiry might prompt them to turn on the RSS feature (for example, at SoundCloud, the RSS feed is not automatic, but it's easy for a podcaster to choose to turn on SoundCloud's RSS feature).

Padlet

Padlet is a popular tool with teachers, and it has RSS, so you can subscribe to new content in a Padlet via Inoreader. Just paste in the Padlet address, and Inoreader's autodiscovery will find the RSS feed for you:


So, if your students are creating content with Padlet in addition to their blogs, you can add the Padlet content feed into the same folder as the student blog feeds. It's all RSS!

Hypothes.is

I don't use Hypothes.is with my classes, but it is a powerful tool, and it has RSS features. Maybe somebody who is using Hypothes.is will experiment with Hypothesis RSS feeds in Inoreader.  Some resources to help with that:
Atom & RSS Feeds for Annotations (from Hypothes.is)
Hypothes.is RSS Feed Widget (from Alan Levine, RSS guru)
If you have examples or tips to share of Hypothesis RSS and Inoreader, let me know!


Okay, that is the last of my Inoreader blog posts; the remaining posts in this series will be about other aspects of running a student blog network, starting with Comments and Randomizers.



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