RSS Feeds--the strange little orange boxes. What do they do???

The RSS feeds work if you are using Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 (or newer!)
RSS feeds work like this. Click on one of the little orange icons and a screen will pop up asking you if you want to subscribe to the feed.

If you subscribe, your computer will then check this feed on a regular basis and, if there are new posts, they will automatically come to your computer! Note: This works with the newest versions of Explorer and Firefox, but I can't vouch for all browers!

An example--having the posts come to your computer:
Let's say you are always looking for new ideas/activities for teaching vocabulary in your ESL classroom.
1. Go the the section titled "Vocabulary" under the "Reading Resources" category.
2. Next to the "Vocabulary" title, you will see the orange rss icon.
3. Click on the icon, and it will take you to a new page.
4. In explorer, click on the "subscribe to this feed" link near the top of the page. In Firefox, click on the
"subscribe now" button.
5. In both Explorer and Firefox, you'll get one more screen that pops up, and simply click "subscribe" or "okay"
to finish the process.
6. Now, those programs will check the vocabulary section of the forum on a regular basis, and send you any
new posts.

Another example--having the posts come to a portable account.
There are a number of services available that will allow you to subscribe to podcasts/rss feeds that keep the feeds for you on their server space, instead of having it on your own computers. The advantage of this is that it makes it portable, so you can access your feeds on any computer with an Internet connection.

Firefox.
In the 2.0 version of firefox (or by installing an ad-in for explorer) you can
1. Simply click on the rss button next to the URL for the entire forum at the top of the page.
2. In the window that pops up, select the rss reader that you wish to use (of course, sign up for an account
for that reader first). As you'll see, Google, Yahoo, and Bloglines all have this feature for free.
3. Click "subscribe now"
4. Follow the instructions

The advantage of subscibing this way is that it will subscribe you to "ALL" the boards at once. However, if you are only interested in selected boards, this may not be for you.