Week 4 Thing 8 RSS

First I read about RSS to find out what it was; I had never even heard of it before. Then I tried to subscribe to several news feeds without getting a reader first - oops.
Then my daughter got involved and showed me how to find music and together we "granted" permission to add four songs to my blog site. It was so fun. I could find songs I hadn't heard for years. However, I later edited the title and labels of my posts and the music connections disappeared! The titles still show but not the link to click on to hear the music. I will try later to repair that.
Meanwhile, I read the Google tutorial. The directions were easy to understand with many visuals for clarification. Using Google's reader also allowed for very easy connection to my blog, which is under Google already, and I was able to use the same login and password, which simplifies things.
There were two benefits to this exercise.
First, I have been interested in reading news from the internet rather than wading through just our local paper. A friend had suggested several online news sources he uses for "better" news. Now I can have them at my finger tips without trying to remember where to connect to them.
Second, my daughter and I had fun with her teaching me how to get music I like and her sharing the music she likes. She actually volunteered to make a connection between hers and my accounts so we could each see and hear what the other was adding in the way of music, and then comment. When I questioned the lyrics I thought I was hearing, she had them print out so I could read them. It is nice to open communications again with my teenager.
As a wrap up I viewed the tutorial by Lee LeFever http://www.blip.tv/file/205570/ and was impressed at how quickly and clearly he explained the advatages of RSS using visuals and audio in such simple but easy to remember descriptions. I can use his teaching style in my own class. His following presentation on social bookmarking also caught my interest and I intend to sign up for delicious.com I can use it to organize the "teacher resources" web links I plan to add to my library web pages. Always more ideas and more to do!
Furthermore, I tried to read the blog discussion on the differences between RSS feeds and blogging but could not find it. Instead I read about what makes a good blog and will try to keep those tips in mind (e.g. shorter, good grammar, frequent posts but not too frequent, responding to comments, including visuals...). However, now I can not find that discussion again.