Jamie Wood 
In an earlier post I talked about Scoop.it, a site for bringing together content from different websites (blogs, YouTube, regular webpages, RSS feeds) and ‘curating’ it. Over the past few days I’ve been playing around with a similar service called Feedly. Feedly is described as a ‘magazine style news reader’ – it allows you to draw together content from different blogs, news sites and RSS feeds so that you can view all of your favorite news sites in one place.
(History) teaching applications:
- Provide students with access to up-to-date online content and news. As with Scoop.it, I see this as a valuable way of easily bringing together and providing students with access to content from different online services.
- Provide students with information on release of latest journal articles. You can also draw down content from the RSS feeds on journal websites, to keep up to date with the latest issues. Feedly that thus be used to direct students automatically to the latest publications in their field.
- Ask students – either individually or in groups – to create their own information streams in Feedly. Different students could be asked to research topics online and then share them with the rest of the class. This could be an effective revision activity. Another alternative would be for students to take a different topic and then swap every so often, so that they are collectively adding to one another’s mixes and thereby sharing and growing information on an ongoing basis.
- Use Feedly to draw together content from different student blogs (rather than having to read them all separately).
Similar services:
- Scoop.it – see earlier blog post
- Storify – ‘make the web tell a story’ [= enables you to draw together content from social media sites like Twitter, Facebook etc.]; here’s a blog post that collates a number of ways it has been used in the classroom
- Netvibes: here’s a site I put together years ago on critical thinking; and here’s a blog post on 12 Ways to Use Netvibes in the Classroom
There are lots of other ‘feed readers’ out there that enable you to tie together content on the web (and importantly to make sure that it updates automatically). A search for ‘feed readers’ or ‘curating the web’ will bring up lots of options.
Further reading:
- David Parry (2006), The Technology of Reading and Writing in the Digital Space: Why RSS is crucial for a Blogging Classroom
- Eberopolis (2013), Blog Hunting