I’m sitting in the Rotorua Convention Centre, in David Warlick’s session, The Magic of RSS, blogging in real time thanks to the technology of wireless connection!

As usual I’m up the front learning about RSS, what it is, how it works and how to use it, aggregators, and mashups. On David’s flickr example there was my photo I’d taken on Wednesday of Millenium Hotel where we’d presented and I’d tagged it learningatschool. An example of how powerful tagging and RSS feeds are.

“We are seeing a major shift in how we find information. We’re starting to train the information to find us!”

What did I learn? Tagging is very extremely important. RSS is information power. I could listen to David Warlick all day. It’s about conversations.

It was impressive to see just how easy it to train the information that you might be requiring for the classroom to come to you. Edge of seat stuff! You can RSS anything – from photos, to newspaper articles, blog posts – anything and everything that has an RSS feed. It’s all about being part of the conversation. You can pay particular attention to whatever is important. This is so much better than searching through 633,567,987 hits on Google!

Social bookmarking is something that I’ve started using – I’m now convinced that I should be using it all the time and no longer adding these to my favourites on my laptop. In fact, a lady in the audience at David’s sessions jumped up and yahooed when she realized that you could tap into other people’s bookmarks! Well, he did promise that that would happen.

“The shape of information has changed. This we need to understand. This is literacy. Information that will help you do your job. In most cases Students are not ready for this.”

We need to take advantage of time where we can jump a little ahead of our students and get our heads around how RSS feeds work and making the information come to us. And this is what make me excited. Making that information come to us and showing students how to make information come to them!

Through an aggregator you can connect to people who will help you to do your job. Teachers should be lifelong learners. This is an intensely valuable tool. This is a Personal Learning Network. George Siemens calls this “Connectivism”. Connect to people who can help you do your job. Help you do your job!

Podcasts? Grab the link and drag it into itunes. Works exactly the same way as an aggregator.
Some aggregators David suggested:
The most popular for educators for a long time was – bloglines Not dissimilar from Newsfire (newsfire is a download – not web-based) or Google Reader. That’s what I use.
A lot of people like netvibes (does load a little slowly) What’s nice though is that it allows you shape your aggregator into your own personal digital newspaper.
Web-based aggregators have a definite advantage in that they are available to you no matter which computer you are on.

The conference is almost over. I’m sad but glad to be going home to see my children. I’ve been empowered, motivated, inspired and affirmed. It’s all good!