Fryeburg Academy Physics

Here’s another chance for some extra credit for the fifth marking period. I have been maintaining a blog (which you obviously know if you are reading this), and it would be accurate to say that I’m disappointed by the general lack of participation, especially over the last two or three months. Granted the posts haven’t been as frequent as they should be, but there are plenty of good chances to comment on stuff already here.

One of the reasons I think I don’t get much traffic is that most students aren’t aware of the awesomeness that is RSS. Your task for this assignment is to figure out what RSS is, how to use a reader (there are a bunch of good free ones out there; Google Reader is my preference), and demonstrate how to use one with a screencast.

So what is a screencast? It’s a movie capture of what’s happening on your desktop. How do you make one? Well, that’s something else you’ll have to figure out (here’s a good place to start). You’ll need some software (free downloads are available) and an external microphone to record your voice.

So that’s your assignment: make a screencast with audio instructions on how to configure an RSS reader. Here are some questions that your screencast should answer.

1. What is RSS?
2. What kind of sites use RSS?
3. How can you tell if a website has an RSS feed?
4. What does the RSS feed itself look like?
5. What is an RSS reader?
6. How do you subscribe to an RSS feed using a reader?
7. What are some good sites (besides this one, of course) that you’ve found to put in your reader?

There is not a minimum length for your screencast, but it shouldn’t be much more than 5 minutes in length. Save your screencast as a video and upload it to YouTube, then email the link. In order to get credit I must receive the email by the end of the fifth marking period: 2:32 pm on Friday May 1. Any email received after this time will not be accepted, and any video that is not emailed to me will not be accepted. Videos that meet the requirements satisfactorily will be counted as two standard homework assignments (30 HW points total for Honors, 50 for AP). Please leave your videos on YouTube so we can all enjoy them!

Addition 3/29/09: here is a pdf file that gives an overview of screencasting. Might be useful!

This entry was posted on March 26, 2009 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. Tagged: Extra Credit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.