1. Nanuet Professional Development
Technology Cheat Sheet
RSS Feeds
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. RSS Feeds let content producers easily send their information
and users to easily receive information. Think of subscribing to RSS Feeds as a magazine subscription.
Instead of going to the newsstand everyday to check for the latest publications the magazines are sent
directly to you when new magazines or content is created. RSS Feeds are a time saver, it might take you
an hour to look through 10 websites the traditional way but you can look through 10 websites with an
RSS Reader in 15 minutes. For example if I read a blog about knitting but the person who writes the blog
only updates it every once and a while I can put the RSS Feed of the blog into an RSS Feed Reader and
whenever the publisher writes a new post I will be notified in my Reader. I do not have to constantly go
and check the blog for new information. It works the same with news sites. If I follow the RSS Feed for
the New York Times Breaking News I can receive the latest updates with out constantly checking the
website. RSS Feeds help people organize the abundance of information they may seek on the web. RSS
can help students and teachers organize research and keep up to date with current information. A
targeted search can be set up through RSS Feeds, you can set up a feed to forward you the latest news on
the oil spill or stem cell research whenever it is published almost anywhere online. Google Reader,
Bloglines and Netvibes are the three most popular readers. Google Reader and Bloglines are good
readers if you just want text. Netvibes is more of a visual reader. My tutorial will go through Google
Reader.
1) Navigate your browser to http://www.google.com/reader/.
2) Most websites, blogs and podcasts will have orange RSS Feed subscription buttons. Clicking on
these buttons will give you a link for the subscription feed
(http://feeds.nytimes.com/nyt/rss/Technology). You will plug this feed into a Reader program to
keep track of your subscriptions.
3) Some browsers like Internet Explorer below will notify you when you are on a webpage that has
an RSS Feed. If I click the orange button in the yellow box below I will get the link for the NYT
Technology Feed.

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4) Google Reader has two panels. The left panel is where you can manage your RSS Feed
subscriptions and the right panel is where you can read your descriptions.
5) All Items will let you view all your content that is coming in. I use this button to read all of my RSS
Feeds. For the most part you will just use All Items and not the other features in this section.
Starred Items are all the posts you favorite or bookmark. Shared Items are posts you share.
Notes allow you to see notes you add to posts. Trends will show you the statistics of your
subscriptions. Browse Stuff will be recommendations based on the sites you follow. Comment
view will show subscriptions for people you follow. Explore will let you find websites to subscribe
to. Subscriptions on the bottom will list all of the sites you subscribe to.

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6) Click on Add a Subscription in the top left to put in an RSS Feed for a website you wish to follow.
7) I put in RSS Feeds for a website, YouTube channel, podcast and blog to show the mix of media you
can follow. The bottom left lists my subscriptions and the right panel shows the mix of posts
coming in from each subscription. I can choose to sort by newest or oldest.
8) You can click on an item to read a snippet of the post or a full post if it is short. You can choose to
click through to the original item or Star the item to bookmark it Like the item for future
reference, Share with friends with or with out note, email, mark as Unread and Add Tags to easily
find the post.

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9) I like to organize my subscriptions into folders by clicking on Manage Subscriptions on the bottom
left of the screen. You can add all of you Education subscriptions to one folder and your News to
another. Now all of my subscriptions are in one folder.