IdealTool: Custom RSS Creation: Ryan Eby - Education and Technology Tim also stated that he was looking into using RSS to syndicate book lists and other things on the school homepage, but perhaps he could go one step further and use it to showcase student work (presuming there were classes where students kept weblogs). By having each student's weblog create an RSS feed, it is quite easy for a teacher to showcase a certain student's web work on the teacher's homepage. Perhaps the teacher could change which student's work got showcased every so often. The ability of parents to subscribe to their child's work also lets them stay up to date on what's being done in that class.
Ryan Eby has a great piece about the use of RSS in education. Lots of good ideas to get one thinking of many possible uses. In the excerpt above he refers to the Buckman School page and the list of recommended books from the media specialist. This list is fed to the home page via RSS. He expands the example to include student work. For the most part the students I am working with are younger and do not have individual weblogs, but some of their teachers are starting to document student work and we are using Movable Type to route work to their pages.(example: Lynne Leake's classroom page)
The more I dig into the numerous plug-ins that have been developed for Movable Type the more I am impressed. Am going to be working with the art teacher next week to help him develop a virtual art gallery. By using categories, we can create numerous RSS feeds to deliver content to various sections of the web site. There is one plug-in that allows for the routing of a random entry. If the school district was interested we could even route art work to them for display on their pages. (not that they are interested.. but they could if they were... :-) ) Currently they have a very Byzantine process for submitting art work for publication. Imagine if all they had to do was put a little code in their template and then automatically art work would be routed to them via RSS...