
ITGS students must stay up to date with the latest developments in information technology. This is essential to truly understand and evaluate the social impacts and ethical issues raised in ITGS. Evaluating news articles is also a critical skill for Paper 2. RSS feeds provide a great way to do this. RSS is a ‘push’ technology – it brings the latest updates to a web site (in this case, the latest news articles) to you, so you don’t need to keep visiting the site to check for changes.
RSS feeds are collated in an RSS Reader (also called a news reader). A selection of popular RSS readers is given below. Once configured, you can add news feeds manually by clicking the RSS icon on web sites, or you can download and import these ITGS news feeds which contain recommended news sites: ITGS RSS feeds.opml
RSS Owl
RSSOwl is my preferred offline news reader. It is compact, lightweight, and has a great range of features. Even better, it is multi-language and cross platform. It has a wide range of configuration options so you can select when and how often it checks your feeds for updates.
Google Reader
Web-based (www.google.com/reader/)
Google’s news reader is web-based, meaning it will work on any device with a web browser. Log in with your Google account and Reader integrates with the rest of Google’s products. The interface will be very familiar to GMail users.
Bloglines
Bloglines is another popular online reader. Bloglines has a very customisable user interface, including the ability to preview several RSS feeds on screen at the same time.
Once you have set up your news reader, don’t forget to import the ITGS news feeds.
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