As a busy teacher it often gets hard to check a lot of my favorite sites each night to grab the latest goodness that they have to offer. A lot of these sites have updated news on education and I like to keep up to date. Luckily there’s a way to keep up to date without having to go to all of them. Using RSS feeds and igoogle (google’s personalized webpage) we’ll show you how to get set up to see the latest news of your favorites all in one easy to read page.

RSS feeds, for those that aren’t already aware, are a way for a website to broadcast their latest headlines. Let’s say you wanted to browse only the latest headlines for TeacherTechBlog along with all of your other favorites, but didn’t want to go to each one of them and browse them individually. RSS feeds can make it happen.

Let’s start by using one of the most used free services, google. Go ahead and check out Google and sign up from their main page. Doing this will give you a personalizable home page that let’s you add some very useful things along side these RSS feeds. Join us back here once you’ve registered and signed in.

Now that that is taken care of let’s get it looking the way we want it. It will start you out with a set of popular content. You can choose what you want to start with, save and then we’ll get a little deeper and more personalized.

There’s a couple of things that can be added to this page. The first are the gadgets. These handy little things will provide you with useful tools such as calendars, webmail alerts, weather and so on. It’s not what we’re focusing on but hit the Add Stuff link on the right and browse what they have to offer anyhow. Simply hit the Add Now button to send it to your home page.

While you’re at the Add Stuff page, let’s begin with some RSS goodness. You will notice a text box at the top followed by a Search Homepage Content button. This will let you search for popular feeds that google has already indexed. Let’s use lifehacker.com as an example. It’s a fantastic page with bundles of technology tips. Type lifehacker into the textbox and hit search. A results page for all of lifehacker’s feeds will pop up. The top one is their main one with all of their latest headlines. You can click add it now to send it to your homepage, or click the lifehacker link to view a preview and some information about the site.

After you have tried the example, go ahead and search for your favorite webpages, or type some keywords to see what other sites google has found with related content.

Didn’t find what you were looking for? Sometimes google hasn’t found the page you want and you have to add it manually. Simply go to your webpage of choice and look for the RSS icons. or . If your page has RSS feeds available these icons will appear on their main page. If they do click on the link to see their feed page. Simply copy the url from that page and head back to the Add Stuff page. You will notice an Add by Url link next to the search box. Simply click on it. Enter in the address you just copied, and you can add it that way.

When you finish adding everything you want go to your homepage. You should see boxes with the headlines for the sites you add along with any gadgets you added. Handy.

Go on and mess around with it. Get all of your favorites. The homepage is very customizable. You can change the colors, add animations and drag and drop anything on the page to move it. And don’t forget to add us. http://teachertechblog.com/feed/