Sweet Spot

Today a neat idea came up during Umber Shamim’s thesis defense. (Congrats Umber!) How can teachers integrate up-to-date news items into curriculum without having to go do all the legwork and research themselves? The suggestion was raised–what about RSS feeds? Not for a particular news outlet, but rather for a particular online curriculum unit (what some call curriculets and others call curnits). What you’d need to build is a big filtering tool that processed loads of news feeds, and segmented them based on whether they had relevance to a particular curricular activity or educational software program. Then, the program in the classroom could use the RSS feed to update itself with more recent resource materials for the activity. It’s sort of like how the librarian in an elementary school can help out the teacher by assembling a ‘cart’ of materials for a particular unit, without the teacher having to read and/or locate those materials. Obviously, this only works if the unit isn’t designed around a particular resource, i.e., if this is more like the library cart of materials for reference or extra background. But even if these feeds had to be manually assembled by the curriculum authors, it would provide a way for a small number of people to keep a large number of classrooms up to date.