I know that most everyone that is reading this has heard of RSS feeds. What I also know is that so many people either under use an RSS reader or don’t use it at all.

There are a ton of RSS tools out there, some are extensions of like Sage for Firefox, Google Reader, and there are stand alone readers like Filterbox , Toluu, Hordit, Social Median, and Mac mail even has an integrated RSS feed reader. Many of these tools are also integrated into a much larger social community to help filter out the noise and make your experience even more rich. So why is RSS such an underused tool?

First off we need to address who would benefit from using an RSS tool and to do this I am going to steal a schtick from Jeff Foxworthy:

• If you spend any more than 30 min a day on the internet, ya might need RSS.
• If you look at the same website more than 4 times a month, ya might need RSS.
• If you feel like you miss world news, ya might need RSS
• If you like to maintain currency with anything, ya might need RSS
• If you ever feel bogged down going on the internet, ya might need RSS.

In my opinion the reason RSS feeds are so underused is a lack of understanding and technical jargon. That coupled with the thought that they can be hard to setup and difficult to use. In 2 minutes you can have an RSS reader setup and be using it, when youfind a website you want to add you only have to click one or 2 buttons to have it added. It’s that easy.

So what is RSS?

Essentially RSS brings the web to your door and allows you to quickly scan the articles that you already find interesting and either fully read them or determine if you would rather not.

I personally use Google Reader and I subscribe to 59 websites and get on average 200-250 new articles everyday, Now if I were to go to every website and look through those articles I would easily take up my entire workday but because of RSS I am able to scan all those articles, read the ones that I find most interesting and bookmark them if need be all in 45 min spread out the day. Essentially this increases my productivity by over 800 percent.

Not only is my productivity up but I pair this up with other social networking tools such as twitter and even the built in sharing tools that most RSS feeds have now and I am able to share articles that my co-workers and colleagues find useful which keeps them current and up to date.

If you are like me though there are tools that you can use to further filter a website that you have subscribed to. Pipes by Yahoo! will filter based on nearly whatever criteria you wish. I use it primarily for a website called Gizmodo which has nearly a hundred posts a day but I have it filtered to give me only 20-30 articles per day of things that I know I am going to be interested in instead of all the other articles that I know I won’t read.

How can I use this for education?

• Increase productivity
• Stay up to date with current trends in education, technology or whatever
• You won’t miss important articles
• Waste less time on the internet
• archive articles you like
• develop relationships with colleagues and share important articles

As usual I am open to know how you think it can be used in education and look forward to my RSS setup article coming soon. Also I will be posting my thoughts on the different RSS tools that I listed above.