I'm developing my ReviseICT.co.uk at the moment and am soon to add a range of simple revision quizzes to help students revise key ICT concepts.

I've updated the home page so it makes all the resources more immediately available - including the introductions to flash and the guide to making a website.

However, I've been quite pleased with the news feature I've introduced recently. Designed to offer students an opportunity to see how their learning is actually directly linked to the 'real world' the page displays the latest 'ICT and technology' news from a range of sources.

I've added this news so it dynamically appears on specific pages across the site and have also introduced a more in-depth news page: http://www.reviseict.co.uk/news.shtml
[N.B. It takes a few moments to 'gather' the latest news when you visit the page]

What may be of passing interest is the way I've been able to do this. It doesn't work perfectly yet, but it is quite clever.

The news is kept up to date because it makes use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication). This is a very simple way of allowing webpages to display up to date news and information from other sites. The BBC provide an excellent overview of the concept on their site - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3223484.stm

Many sites now provide an 'RSS feed' that allows anyone to make use of their content. However, a website owner cannot just upload an RSS feed to their website as it will not be correctly formatted.

The site uses an additional php script called RSS2HTML. The RSS2HTML script takes the rss feed and displays it in an accessible format on this website. It hopefully works really well. The main pages of the site are set to display the six latest stories from The Register and the three latest stories from BBC Technology News. However the news page displays a much wider range of ICT and technology news from the leading online news and information sources.

Give it a try - the tool seems to be a really effective way of making use of the growing number of RSS-feeds that are available. Nearly all major websites now provide an RSS-feed.

What an excellent site
RSS feeds sound really interesting too. I feel a little experiment coming over me tomorrow

Best feeds to try out with are the BBC feeds - they very clearly link to their feeds and there is one for each section of the news. The BBC link I gave above is very useful.

I you are interested there is a good article on http://www.Sitepoint.com about RSS.

Get off your RSS (not my title, I hasten to add).

I imagine there are some quite promising Citizenship opportunities for a school site signing up to specific feeds? Do you intend tio use it on your school site?

We actually use a slightly different service where the RSS is pre-packaged and doesn't need to be processed on your own site: https://ssl.bbc.co.uk/syndication/html/registration/

Our school website is on a very limited server that cannot handle .php and suchlike, so we use this method instead.

Great site! Something I have been looking or for quite some time now!

Just in case anyone is interested I've recently updated the site much more with revision activities for students as they rapidly approach their exams.
http://www.reviseict.co.uk/

Lots of revision activities, games and quizzes are avaiable at:
http://www.reviseict.co.uk/revision/

It was only a quick creation, but I've also setup a simple past-paper question activity that encourages students to enter their ideas, and then compare this with model answers:
http://www.reviseict.co.uk/revision/exampractice.shtml