We have made things easy for you in terms of finding each other’s public blogs by way of the EDCI Blog Hub, but that won’t be there forever. Individuals can use “RSS Readers” to subscribe to “feeds” from websites. RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or often Really Simple Syndication. It sounds too techy, but just think of it as helping you to “follow” blogs in a “reader” program, much like how Instagram is a “reader” you use to follow accounts.

One reader we recommend is Feedly. Note that it is US-based, so if you choose to create an account there, be aware of that as it relates to your privacy. Read up on our Privacy Resource page if you have not already done so. You can subscribe to news blogs, political blogs, blogs of other educators, blogs of your learners, etc.

You also have the option of subscribing to blogs within WordPress.

If you are interested in exploring more advanced, though not that hard, RSS aggregation and want to learn more about how we set up the EDCI 337 Blog Hub, feel free to chat with your instructor. In short, we used a WordPress Plug-in called “Feedzy,” which copies content from blog RSS feeds and imports that into the blog it’s installed on. If you are using a site on opened.ca, there is a plugin available to you called “FeedWordPress” that you can use to do the same thing as Feedzy, but with more options.

How to find an RSS feed for a site.

WordPress automatically generates a feed for sites and comments and you can find the feed by simply adding ‘/feed’ to a wordpress url. For example, the feed for this site is https://edtechuvic.ca/edci337/feed. Further, you can subscribe to a specific category on a site. This is what we do to aggregate your posts for EDCI 335, and is why you must use that category every time you post. To find the feed for a category you add /category/[slug-of-the-category]/feed. So if you want to subscribe to Heidi’s posts in Feedly, you would use https://edtechuvic.ca/rmccueadmin/category/edci337/feed .

Note that following the links to those feeds will only show you a page of code. You need to use a feed reader to view the actual posts. We have provided instructions for setting up Feedly here. You do not need to pay for a subscription to Feedly, the free version will work for this course.