No, this is not a spin on the dog ate my homework but rather using an RSS feed to syndicate your assignments, notes and/or announcements and have them pushed right to your students homepage or RSS reader.
I do not believe in providing the entire homework list for the semester. Instead, I prefer to give out assignments piecemeal as this allows me to add or subtract assignments based in individual classes.
Back In The Old (Web 1.0) Days
When the web first appeared, I saw that I could be more productive by supplying my assignments and notes via a webpage. I found that students read the assignments before coming to class leading to more thoughtful questions on them which better utilized the lecture time. After one semester, I had a master webpage of homework assignments from which I would cut and paste the particular assignment to the active page and/or add additional assignments. At first the student would check the page often but as the Internet became more commonplace, I found myself saying there is a new assignment out on the web everyday, which was followed by what is it.
If you are like me, spending time asking your students to pull your material from a webpage, then you are ready to deliver (push) your assignments, announcements, and / or class notes to them via an RSS feed. Creating an RSS feed is no more difficult than creating a web page. The advantage is that they become available to them whenever you syndicate the assignment. Students can get their homework assignments delivered right to their homepage or aggregator, even on the weekend, wherever they are.
How to create your own feed / syndicate your handouts with RSS.
The simple way, create a blog that only you can post to. By their very nature, a blog can be syndicated into a feed. If you look at the bottom right hand corner of this blog (rmweb20.wordpress.com) under Meta you will see Entries RSS and Comments RSS. Both of these are feeds that can be subscribed to.
The second way is a more technical way and might appeal to some. The requirements are simply requiring web space for your web pages and XML files. (which you have if you are currently creating webpages).
You will need to have:
- Individual webpage’s for your content / assignments.
- A program to create the XML (that babble you see when you click on the orange button). This is a single webpage that ties together all your posts.
Warning, for those who like to instant gratification when uploading a webpage, such is not the case with creating your own syndicated site. It may take your aggregator (different aggregators have different update times) some time before it updates your feed and the new item becomes available.
RSSeditor v0.9.54: (http://www.rss-info.com)
Pros: Nice Interface, inexpensive.
Cons: Writes out proprietary project file. Can not (or at least what I found) import or export prior RSS projects.
FeedForAll: (http://www.feedforall.com/Pros. It grows on you.
Cons. Somewhat expensive at $50, does not upload your content pages, somewhat cryptic.
) which allows you to pull their content to you. You might wish to use a website that collects or aggregates your feeds such as bloglines, or you could insert the feeds as live bookmarks right into your personalized homepage or course authoring site. 
Web 2.0: Read, Discuss, Contribute, Collaborate. 