Smarter searching with the internet

 

 

Coming soon...

30 April, Coping with information - ICT Coordinators

24 May, Smarter Searching With The Internet- cancelled

What people have said:

"The feedback... was very positive - a genuine practical training sessions with ideas which could be used... day-to-day, straightaway on Monday morning"

Course Summary

In this course participants aimed to answer the following questions:

• What are the different ways you can search for information on the web?
• What is Really Simple Syndication (RSS)?
• How can you set up a personal homepage with personalised information from the web?
• How can this be useful in teaching and learning?

Searching for information on the web

Google carry some helpful cheat sheets on searching the web to find out different types of information.

What is Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

In the newspaper industry it has been common for years for Picture Editors to find suitable snaps "on the wire", or for freelance journalists and news agencies to syndicate their stories on the wire i.e. send them out once for thousands of news editors to receive them in their newsrooms. The wire was actually copper wire that would carry the telex of the report (you might have seen films with all those automatic typewriters thumping away in the wireroom).

In the 21st Century newspapers and now individuals can have information come to them in the same way through their personal computer, using Really Simple Syndication. Here's a fun video which explains the concept:

http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

Andrew Brown has a nice flash movie explaining RSS:

http://www.whereisab.co.uk/trackblogs.php

Basiically, RSS allows one person to publish information once, and for any number of people who choose to receive it to get it instantly. It's like an email subscription but it allows the enduser to avoid email overload.

Setting up a personal private or public homepage on the web

There are some easy-to-use and pretty-to-look-at solutions for making a personal homepage:

• PageFlakes (works best within East Lothian Council computers)
• Netvibes (has sometimes had glitches in East Lothian)

Setting up a private homepage / web reader

• GoogleReader

Using RSS in Education

eduBuzz has an Explore page which is, in fact, a set of RSS public pages on PageFlakes. These bring together selected blogs into a feature page, a Glow page and then into Cluster pages.

Using RSS for all sorts of feeds

Many web 2.0 sites provide information via rss, here are a few ideas:

• del.icio.us http://del.icio.us provides lots of feeds. you can follow a persons additions to their links eg http://del.icio.us/rss/tbarrett give you tom Barrett's links. You can get a feed for a particular tag: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/scotedublogs of a feed of links sent to you by your contacts (that will be a private feed).
• flickr http://www.flickr.com provides feeds for a persons photos: http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=25747180@N00&format=rss_200 or photos with a particular tag: http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=teachmeet07&format=rss_200 groups and even comments on your own photos.
• technorati http://www.technorati.com/ provides feed for lots of things, searches for topics or tags on blogs, you can even set up a feed t olet you know when someone is talking about you by setting up a watchlist.