Teaching Blogs, RSS, and Podcasting to Explorer Scouts
As an advisor for an Explorer Scout Post 631 (Computer Technology) I occasionally have to teach a lesson to the students. Last week I choose Blogging, RSS, and Podcasts. A rough outline of the lesson I taught was:
- Blogging
- What is Blogging?
- Examples of Blogging
- Why are Blogs so popular?
- How do you start a Blog?
- Pass out direction sheet on how to start one while calling on a student to walk through starting a Blog for the class.
- RSS, The Technology Behind Blogging
- Quick overview of Really Simple Syndication.
- Starting a news aggregator subscription.
- Describe why its so cool -> Content Aggregation
- Demo my subscriptions
- Pass out direction sheet on how to start one while calling on a student to walk through starting a Bloglines (News Aggregation) subscription.
- How to search for feeds to subscribe too.
- How to search across all Blogs.
- Podcasting
- What is it Podcasting?
- Examples of Podcasts.
- How to search and subscribe to podcast
- The steps involved in podcasting
- Record the broadcast
- Edit broadcast
- Publish the Podcast
- Break up into groups by table and have each group plan out a 3 minute Podcast, Record it, Bring it back to their laptops, Clean it up with the software and pass on back to me where I’ll podcast them out to the internet.
The links to the tutorials I handed out are:
- “Starting a Blog” Directions
- “Using a RSS Aggregator” Directions
- “Subscribing to Podcasts” Directions
- “Making Podcasts” Directions
Something pretty coincidental happened when I showed my favorite video blog, Rocketboom. They just happened to announce RSS day where Amanda Congdon was speaking on all the stuff I was presenting on.
Now I just need to create the podcasts for the recordings they made.