Before everything went online, teachers shared ideas and resources by meeting face-to-face at conferences and collegiate gatherings, or through an academy. Resources were in paper form (or papyrus) and good ideas took months and years to get distributed through a community.

Old School

Sharing depended on the good-will of good teachers.

New School

Enter the information age: digital resources are now shared quickly and easily, without the need for face-to-face interaction. Educational institutions and organisations promote and assist this distributive process with online resource directories.

NSW DET teachers have a wealth of digital resources to draw from, with corporate online directories such as TaLe, CLI, regional offices, and the VC Cafe.

However, the sheer quantity of resources makes keeping track of what’s there, and when it’s updated, difficult and time consuming. Teachers have to consciously return to these directories to check for new ideas and resources. It’s a swarming mass of media. This is counter-intuitive to the digital age.

But, a technology which is good at searching, aggregating, and displaying update data is RSS.

How does RSS work? Watch:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzcHDvWb0mQ How RSS works (1:25)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU RSS in Plain English (3:45)

Resource directory feeds

So here’s the idea: each resource directory include an RSS feed. Teachers could then use an RSS reader to aggregate updates from multiple sources. There’s no need to consider combining resource directories into a central corporate database, as each teacher could personalise their RSS reader to subscribe to, and aggregate feeds from, directories of interest.

More Than Directory Updates

News blog feeds

But RSS could and should be used for more than just resource directory updates.

School newsletters are a collection of news articles pulled together and printed at a specific time on a regular basis (usually weekly). Instead of publishing a group of articles once a week, the articles could be published individually as a news blog, and parents subscribing to the blog’s RSS feed would be notified immediately via their reader when new items are posted. The blog would allow for feedback and comments on each item. This starts the conversation that many schools want with their parents and community stakeholders.

The idea: schools stop desktop publishing newsletters as a collection of articles. Instead, blog these as individual items. blogED already has RSS enabled, so if the school news blog was Public, the school community could subscribe to that blog’s RSS feed through their RSS reader and see (and comment on) the latest happenings and successes of the school.

Corporate RSS reader

But wait, there’s more …

With a corporate authenticated RSS reader as part of DET Portal access, school staff could aggregate feeds from several closed corporate sites and resource directories. If the sites enabled personalised search feeds, staff wouldn’t need to regularly check for new resource items, as the RSS feed would display the latest updates for that authenticated user search. Inbuilt search services returned as RSS feeds would help navigate the mass of resource media.

Group blog feeds

With an authenticated RSS reader, blogs could be created for groups of staff.

For example, a school staff blog could allow all staff at a campus to access a history of meeting minutes, and an RSS feed would enable them to see and read the latest approved entries. Adding new staff members to the group would instantly provide them with access to a searchable history of entries.

Further, a cross-site staff group (e.g. TAS staff within a Community of Schools), could use blog/RSS to coordinate information and share resources. This would prevent the need for emailing Word or PDF files to lists of individuals. Members could be added to and removed from the blog, and all authenticated users could reference the blog as a searchable archive.

This could also be used for such regular internal sharing as student Daily Notices (Public blog) and upcoming staff meeting agenda items (Private blog). The number of blogs would not matter, as an RSS reader would aggregate all entries from a variety of RSS feeds for that particular authenticated user (staff or student).

Nutshell

1. Corporate sharing sites and resource directories include RSS feeds (customisable to return user searches)
2. Schools implement their newsletter as a Public news blog (with staff authors and principal delegated approvers)
3. DET Portal introduce an authenticated RSS reader
4. Staff trained to understand the value of RSS over email for distributing content and resources to groups

Sharing still depends on the good-will of good teachers, but now it’s much easier to share masses of media with blogs and RSS.

What do you think? Too hard to implement technically? (No) Too hard to implement organisationally? (Maybe)