For the first assignment in Module 3, we were asked to create a Feedly.com account and subscribe to various RSS feeds. While I have some experience with RSS (“Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary”)–I even used the now-defunct Google Reader for a while–it’s not something that I use in my every day life. While I can absolutely see the benefit of amalgamating everything into one site and deleting all of the email alerts I get, I use those email alerts to help remind me to check the websites I visit. I am afraid that I will not check Feedly as often as I should, and some important information could fall to the wayside. Perhaps being “forced” to use Feedly will help alleviate the issue and I will get into the habit.
Confession time: I’ve never written a lesson plan. Ever. I was glad to be able to view my classmates’ lessons as inspiration to help me complete this assignment. Because I do not have the experience that they do, this assignment was more difficult for me than some of the others. In addition, the courses I teach are about interdisciplinary studies. I can see that RSS/Feedly can be very helpful in keeping my students up to date on their topics, but I am concerned that the sources available via Feedly will not be academic enough to help them with their assignments. I thought that it would be fantastic to be able to incorporate Google Scholar Alerts into the Feedly reader, but after some search I found Google Scholar does not support RSS functionality and the workarounds aren’t always accurate. (Seriously? In this day and age?)
If I had more time, I’d like to try to use RSS and Feedly to provide examples that pertain to my guest speaker’s topics. Similar to Mindi Torrey’s lesson plan, I would like students to find real-world examples of interdisciplinarity that intersect with what we are learning in class that week and have them reflect on that. However, since I do not know the schedule of guest speakers or their topics yet, I did not feel confident enough to base my lesson plan around that.
I do plan to use this lesson plan (with permission of my co-instructor) because I still think it’s a powerful tool that can be useful to students. I will just need to make my expectations clear that academic resources are the priority for their literature review, and help my students find those sources.
Katya Konkle: EDTECH Learning Log 