Clever App

Recently, I spent a few hours customizing an app to consolidate and share a wide range of professional learning content. The resulting tool, Clever App, compiles RSS feeds from many sites into one handy iPhone app.

Creating a custom app has a certain level of cachet, and though it may seem to be a daunting task, the online service AppMakr.com allows anyone familiar with RSS to create a working app. With a little bit of photo-editing, you can customize an app icon; splash page; and banner. Then, you just locate; copy; and paste the RSS feeds you'd like to include.

There are 5 custom feeds I've built into Clever App:

1] Blog: This button provides the most up-to-date access to all posts on The Clever Sheep blog.

2] Podcast: All current episodes of the Teacher 2.0 Podcast will load and play right within the app.

3] PLN News: This button provides access to the most popular stories and hyperlinks shared by members of my Twitter network. In addition, notable stories and blog posts from my feed reader, are tagged 'PLN' to automate their upload to the app.

4] Bookmarks: Each day, I save a wide range of described content to my Delicious account. Each of these bookmarks, are accessible from the fourth tab.

5] SlideDecks: Each of my public slide presentations is accessible from this Slideshare feed.

An RSS app like Clever App can serve many functions. Whether you are a school administrator looking to aggregate district news feeds; a teacher or student creating an e-portfolio; or a lifelong learner looking to consolidate your favourite subscriptions, you can create and distribute a custom app after only a few hours work.

While there are other options for building an app, developers can create an AppMakr account and play around at no risk. You only need to pay if you decide to have the app built and posted to the iTunes app store. Before following through with a build, I'd recommend checking the web for discount codes. In the end, my app ended up costing me just $49.

RSS: Get inside the wrapper!

If RSS is 'Really Simple Syndication" why do so few people really understand it?

If you are reading this blog because you have subscribed to an appropriate feed, then you likely won't get anything out of this post. If, on the other hand, you came across this post randomly, then you might consider taking advantage of RSS to provide yourself with 'one-stop' reading.

The best analogy that I can come up with for Really Simple Syndication, is the chocolate bar. You might be attracted to the wonderful packaging, but really, what you want, is the candy that exists inside the wrapper!

Really Simple Syndication ensures that the CONTENT can be subscribed to, while the FORM is inconsequential. In the 'old days' of 5 or 10 or more years ago, web authors used to spend lots of time customizing the form of their content. Fonts, sizes, colours, and other attributes that adapted and augmented the content ('the wrappings') if you like, are becoming secondary to the content. RSS, allows the reader to focus solely on the content. You might want to view "RSS in Plain English".

A quick and entertaining explanation of RSS is included within The Machine is Us/ing Us:



In order to access the content, you need to select and get comfortable with a 'feed-reader'. These 'aggregators' are free and widely available. I prefer Google Reader because it has the same look and feel as my G-mail account, but there are many options available.

Once you have a feed-reader, you can subscribe to all kinds of syndicated content. Just look for the orange RSS symbol in any URL, and you can copy the entire URL from your address bar, to add a subscription to your feed-reader:



Now you can subscribe to all types of content, including:

Your friends Flickr images
A colleagues bookmarks: http://del.icio.us/thecleversheep
Your favourite newspapers: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Any of a number of Blogs... like this one: http://feeds.feedburner.com/thecleversheep
or Podcasts: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ E-learningDaily

I didn't mention this in today's Teacher 2.0 Podcast, but this is just the beginning of huge changes in the way we access information! As coders are coming to realize, you can also draw RSS information into other sites and programs, resulting in a wave of new 'mash-ups' that are turning the world wide web on its ear. What are you waiting for? After all, it is "REALLY SIMPLE SYNDICATION"!