RSS Lesson Plan

I was excited about this unit on RSS feeds. I was familiar with Feedly and the concept of RSS feeds. I had already set up a Feedly account for personal use and found it to be very addictive and have often had to limit my time reading through all the articles that Feedly sent each day. Using an RSS feed really makes the me realize how limitless information can be.

As I progressed through this unit, my biggest discovery and challenge was the lack of RSS feeds targeted toward students in elementary school. Specifically, RSS feeds available for students below the 4th grade level. I was really frustrated and spent many hours searching for age-appropriate materials for my young students.I really wanted to develop lessons that were authentic and useful for my students. I began to see and understand that if one was to look for engaging interactive and educational material for the 3-9 year old group, apps were numerous and readily available but web activities and sites were not. I really spent a lot of time thinking about this issue and came to the realization that this scenario made sense for a couple of reasons. First, parents, teachers and caregivers do not want these youngest students on the Web for fear of exposure to inappropriate material. Second, apps are readily available and can be used across many platforms and devices without internet access thus making them easier to access and transport. Still, I feel that this group should be better served on the web.

Given more time, I would have liked to develop (and plan to develop) a blog for the young students I serve with sites and resources for them and the grade level teachers. Through Feedly, I have begun to gather sites and sources and hope to develop a blog on WordPress as a resource for my school.

I have piloted the lesson I developed for this unit with two different groups of third graders during this past week. It was highly successful and the students were very engaged with the articles on Scholastic and very excited about the entire lesson. In the future I plan to have the assessment done on the computer/iPad rather than on paper so that students will get additional keyboarding time to continue to develop keyboarding skills.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eNXCbiBFFXuNJfAAnUFehx7Su4e69n6B-blICmhvG5A/edit?usp=sharing