Instructure Canvas features a pretty powerful Pages tool that allows for rich text editing, quick linking to tools and activities, and embedding multimedia. It does not, unfortunately, support the embedding of RSS or Atom news feeds. Pages strips out your Javascript, too, so there’s no use trying to roll your own feed parser. But there is a work-around: use Feedburner and an IFRAME.
The iframe element, like the HTML frame, is infamous because it traps content inside a restricted browser frame. If the purpose of embedding a news frame in a Canvas Page is to help people access external content, you should tell them to CTRL + click links from the feed in order to open them in a new tab/window.
Feedburner is a web service that transforms regular web pages or news feeds into custom news feeds with static URLs that you can manage through a single account. Feedburner produces a human-readable version of a feed. And since Feedburner is now owned by Google, you can use your existing Google account.
Once logged in to Feedburner.com, create your own new feed by pasting in the URL of the web page or news feed you want to target.
This will produce a Feedburner feed with its own unique URL–make note of that URL from the address bar; we’ll need it to create the iframe in our Canvas course.
The iframe HTML element embeds any URL into a window within a web page. To add an iframe to a Canvas Page, open the Page, click Switch Views to access the HTML, and then type the iframe tags. For example:
…where the SRC attribute value is your Feedburner URL. After saving the Canvas page, you may have to refresh in order to see the results:
In this case, the Feedburner feed is actually a conglomeration of different feeds collected and organized in Google Reader. After sharing the GReader folder, I used Feedburner to convert GReader’s Atom feed into a new feed. This was necessary because Google Reader blocks use of iframes for its shared feeds.
