If you're thinking of incorporating web research, web resources or web publishing skills for students into your teaching and learning activities then Introduction to RSS for educators is worth checking out, even if you can't remember (like me) what RSS stands for, and you've never blogged!

Stephen Downes says "Introduction to RSS for educators ... is receiving wide praise in the blogosphere. Provides instructions not only on how to set up an RSS reader but also ideas on how to use RSS in the classroom. Available as an MS Word document or PDF. By Will Richardson, Weblogg-Ed, March 30, 2004"

Will Richardson's 8 pages of instructions are clear and to the point, with tips for using  web logs/blogs and RSS by teachers for assessment, by students and teachers for managing research, all sorts of things. I followed the link to Bloglines and found myself  looking at Most popular bloggs  - http://www.bloglines.com/topblogs - which has an extensive list of authoritative, up to date resources on all sorts of topics - and the guide tells you how you can harvest them to be readily available for you and your students.

This is what's covered:

• Setting Up an RSS Feed Reader
• Finding and Adding Feeds
• Using RSS Feeds in the Classroom
  • RSS Feeds with Student Weblogs
  • RSS Feeds without Student Weblogs
  • RSS Search Feeds
    • RSS Feeds for News Searches
    • RSS Feeds for Weblog Searches
    • RSS Feeds for Website Searches
    • RSS Feeds for News Group Searches
  • RSS Feeds for Other News Outlets
  • RSS Feeds for Bookmarks
• RSS Resources