Are you a student cramming for an exam? Or you’re deep into research on a paper? Or maybe you are working in education and need a better way to stay on top of education news?
RSS is what you need!
What is an RSS feed reader and how does it work?
Think of an RSS feed reader as a school binder. Everything that’s important regardless of subject matter goes into it. You pull official assignments, mock quizzes, announcements, permission slips, a syllabus, textbook chapters. That’s the principle of content curation in RSS.
RSS feed readers are able to syndicate content from many different sites simultaneously. You get new updates, posts and articles in a chronological order in a master feed. This is done when the RSS reader goes onto a site you’re subscribed to and reads its RSS feed, which is an XML file in the site’s source code. Once a site posts a new update, the feed updates to include it.
Why use RSS in education?
Saves you time
I’m all about removing inconvenience in my life and RSS feed readers are well equipped to do just that. Content syndication is made to save you time. On a purely functional level, you don’t have to save useful articles in bookmarks (bookmarks are so easy to turn into a full-on nightmare) and you don’t have to click from one open tab to another like you’d do in a browser.
You can jump from article to article within your reader. That’s valuable time saved and keeps the user focused on what’s truly important. RSS readers have other tricks to make your life easier – integration with other platforms and services, push notifications, automated actions based on a trigger. The possibilities are endless.
Helps you find the most relevant information
If you’re working on a research-heavy presentation, essay or longer paper, then RSS readers are the ideal tools for performing deep research on the subject. RSS, as a whole, is moving towards discovering content rather than just syndicating it. You have readers, who offer readers quality feeds, and the search functions to get results in a more focused way.
Inoreader has spent a lot of resources on perfecting its discovery zone. Popular feeds, based on the subscriber numbers in Inoreader, are divided into subjects and broader categories. You have the opportunity to browse through new sources and know that these have the community’s full seal of approval. Furthermore, Inoreader has a global search, which helps you find relevant articles and posts across all indexed sites in its database.
You can subscribe to important education feeds
Although we primarily talk about students at all levels, RSS feed readers are excellent for the needs of teachers and those in school administrations. There are quite a few education feeds, which can be of use regardless of where in the hierarchy you fall. You can easily add Education Week, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed and EdSurge.
You might think it’s overwhelming to have so many headlines coming your way. Most sources are heavy on publication and hard to keep up with. But you don’t even need to keep up with all that’s being published. Use your RSS feed reader to filter out what you don’t need or what you do need. If you can subscribe to just a topic on the feed, that’s best, but feeders can limit what you see from a site when wished for. Inoreader can eliminate posts based on keywords or subscribe you to just one specific author on a site.
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You receive information from trusted sources
It all boils down to the correct information. If you’re a teacher or in school administration, you do not want to read a false news article. Misinformation is a rampant issue right now and there’s not much that can be done in order to curb the trend. However, what we can do is change our approach to reading and researching a topic online.
Rather than have to wonder whether an article is telling the truth, select your sources in such a way that you don’t have to worry about it. RSS gives the power in your hand to choose what sites you follow – you’ve vetted them and can rest easy knowing they’re telling the truth. If you’re reading for a project, you’d like to get sources that are trustworthy. The discovery function on the current generation of RSS readers deliver just that.
You have everything in one place
It needs to be said – RSS feed readers are great at collecting information from every corner of the Internet. Yes, you can follow blogs, news sites, digital magazines and forums, but there’s a great value in being able to add to that base podcasts, YouTube videos, threads from Twitter and visual aid from Pinterest or Instagram. The multimedia support, which is expanding, helps you widen your research pool and you don’t have to leave the hub that is your RSS reader.
Readers give you freedom to organize and structure your subscriptions through the use of folders. Just because everything is in one place, doesn’t mean you have to get lost in it. Subscribing is the only tricky part so far, because RSS feeds are not as easy to spot. Depending on your RSS reader, you can add to your subscriptions either through different tools or via a browser extension, which is the case with Inoreader.
You can learn faster and more efficiently
Naturally, what everything boils down to is a much faster, more efficient study time. RSS feed readers present you with options to search and filter out the content you receive so that when you’re on a specific topic of your course or are generally trying to learn new skills you’re in a much better position to do so.
Thanks to the tags, you can get into a specific topic in a subject and the search function is amazing when it comes to finding a precise article without having wasted unnecessary time. In the end, you’ve a better organized, streamlined approach to studying or researching for a paper than without one.
