Google
Reader is my lifeline to other professionals.
In my reader I have feeds to other educators in the fields of
educational technology and second language learning. Each morning I skim through the titles of
blog post feeds to see which ones merit reading. Although some people have feeds from
newspapers, I prefer to use Google Reader just for blog posts.
Some
bloggers post a tremendous amount. (I don't
know when they sleep!) However, since
Reader allows me to view just the titles on my iGoogle homepage, I can quickly
delete material that doesn't interest me. Or if I choose to view items on my Google Reader homepage, I can quickly scroll through my folders in the left sidebar. Since the blogs with recent posts appear in
bold. I can click on them to see the entire posts on the right.
Keeping my Google
Reader manageable requires some "gardening skills." Once in a while, I remember to "weed" my
garden of feeds by going to the Reader page and clicking Trends. That way I can see which subscriptions are less useful by clicking on Inactive or Most Obscure under Subscription Trends and deleting those feeds.
Wow! I think I need
to do that now!
1 comment:
Hi Maryanne, What's you're reaction to Google Reader being discontinued? Have you found an alternative that you'll be migrating to? Thanks for teaching me about the "Trends" feature. I'll keep an eye out for something similar in whatever tool I decide to use instead of Reader. For now I've moved my RSS feeds into Feedly. It has a nice visual layout.
For the purposes of the next round of TOEP an alternative public blogroll option needs to be found. If you (or any other TOEP participants) have leads on an RSS reader that will publicly display a collection of RSS feeds, let me know. I just discovered the blogroll feature because it filled a need relating to TOEP.
Being able to gather streams of relevant info for a particular topic or discipline would be a great addition to an announcement page in an LMS (like Blackboard) and would compliment traditional course content well. One of the built-in features of social-bookmarking and some citation management tools have public library options and collaborative group development, however, they do not easily feature new content when it's added or have the ability to sort based on whether or not the new content has been read.
Maybe a new technology will become available that incorporates all these traits together. Or maybe there's already something out there that I just don't know about yet.
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