Keeping Up-to-Date with a Classroom Website
Families with access to the internet can easily find out current information about their
child’s classroom by visiting the classroom SWIFT site at
http://teacherweb.puyallup.k12.wa.us/
The site can be viewed daily to see if any of the pages or grades have been updated
using the RSS feed posted on the classroom site.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Since our SWIFT sites have RSS, families can
easily stay up-to-date with changes to a website without having to check it on a regular
basis. Our teachers’ SWIFT websites syndicate the home, announcements, grades, and
homework pages, and they automatically refresh the feed if one of these pages is
updated.
To keep all these feeds organized it is suggested that an aggregator be established.
Aggregators retrieve information from each RSS feed and hold it until opened by the
user. If families have more than one classroom site they are watching, they may want to
use an aggregator to save time sorting through pages and pages of websites to see if
anything has been updated. There are many online aggregators; the PSD Instructional
Technology Team recommends using Bloglines.
Steps for creating a free Bloglines account:
Go to: http://www.bloglines.com
1. Register in the upper right hand corner of the screen
2. Enter email address
3. Create 6 character password
4. Click on Register
5. Add Bloglines to your Favorites or paste it into your tool bar for easy access
To add your SWIFT subscription to your Bloglines go to
http://teacherweb.puyallup.k12.wa.us and navigate to the classroom site you want to
keep updated. Then follow these steps:
1. Click on the button at the bottom of the menu.
2. Highlight and copy the URL (Ctrl) (C)
3. Navigate to your bloglines page
4. Choose My Feeds tab
5. Click on Add
6. Paste the URL from the Swift site into the Blog or Feed URL: box (Ctrl) (V) and
choose Subscribe
7. The complete URL should appear in the Available Feeds. You can then decide if
you want create a folder for this URL and other enable other features in
Options.
8. To complete the process choose Subscribe at the bottom of the page.