More than just a little orange icon…

I started seeing this icon around on websites many months ago and wondered what exactly what it was. I knew it had the name of RSS, but I was not too sure what it did. The introduction of Internet Explorer 7.0 as well as upgrades to other popular browsers such as Mozilla Firefox have opened the door to RSS.

RSS is a real time saver, and I have barely started using it!

For those who do not quite know about it, RSS is a subscription to a website that is updated regularly. Instead of checking 100 websites each day to see if there are updates or new posts, RSS will let you know in seconds which have been updated and what the updates are. This would be effective in the classroom because it means if every student in a class has a blog, a teacher would not have to spend hours going through checking every blog for updates.

I mentioned web browsers and RSS just above, but until everyone has a laptop and wireless access every where, the problem is that your RSS updates do not follow you. iGoogle has solved this problem by creating an area for you to store all your subscriptions, and as usual with Google, it is free! That means no matter where you are, if you have a computer and internet access, you’ll have all your favourite website updates sent straight to you!