With the new website, teacher pages are being converted to Teacher Blogs (http://www.lakelocal.org/teacher/default.aspx). One of the best features of blogs is the ability of visitors to subscribe and receive notifications anytime that something on your web-site is added or updated. With our new sites, there are two ways this can happen: Alerts and RSS Feed.

Alerts

Alerts are a very easy to use. Alerts allow parents to receive notification when your web-site is updated. The downside is that they do require the user to be a member of our site. All students from grade 4 up have accounts, and all Parents will have accounts at some point in the near future, but at the time of this writing these are not yet in place.

To set an Alert, go to the blog you wish to subscribe and scroll to the bottom of the page. Click on the Alert Me link as shown in the picture to the right. Make any adjustments to the settings that you wish and click OK when done. At this time, we only have e-mail Alerts avaialble, but we hope to add text alerts in the future.

RSS

The benefit of RSS is that you can subscribe to many pages, but only have to go to one source to read them all. You can think of it as a newspaper delivery service. It collects information of your choosing from all over the web and delivers it to one location. RSS is a way for users to receive information from your website without actually visiting your website. Users read content from your site in a RSS reader. This content is automatically delivered to their reader once a connection is established. There are two steps involved in RSS set-up:

1. Choose a RSS reader
2. Add a feed to your RSS Reader

There are many different options to use for an RSS reader, but the simplest way is to use your email client as your RSS reader. Clients such as Outlook, Thunderbird, and OS X Mail have built-in RSS capabilities, and generally you just need to click on Add an RSS feed to start using them. Some other options are to use a program or web-service such as Google Reader or Bloglines, both are very easy to set-up and use.

Once you have chosen a Reader, you just need feeds to which to connect. You can get these feeds from the RSS Feed link at the bottom of the page (like in the picture above). If you click that link it will direct you to a page the lists the posts for the blog, copy the URL and go to your Reader. In your Reader, add a new feed and paste the URL from the blog as the source. You should now see posts from the new Blog and you can add additional RSS feeds from there.