Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Google Reader Publish to Share


Regina Stewart recently mentioned that she was looking for some good math blogs. Several comments mentioned blogs or websites that were relevant. This got me thinking: if a student was interested in a topic how do we best feed that student's interest? How do we use modern technology to do this?


I decided to create a published webpage of blog entries using Google Reader and method Will Richardson teaches and John Albright has blogged about. Google Reader allows you to "share" any entry in the Reader bin. Once the blog entry or other content is "shared" a static webpage is create with the content. The content can then be viewed like a webpage. A button for this shared content can also be placed on your website, blog, or wiki.


Here is an example using math blog content. The person publishing the content through Google Reader (me in this case) reads through the blog readers and then decides which entries are worth sharing (and presses the share button). Those shareable are automatically published to the shared website. This could be really useful for a principal or department chair to quickly and easily share relevant and previewed content with colleagues. It could also be a cool way for teachers to create shared content for students.

2 comments:

Protsman said...

Joe, great topic. However I'm still a little confused on how you set up the share button. I'm assuming that it's on the google reader page and we use the sharred button on the upper left. But then how do we get our students to access that information? Do we send the link of the static page created or do the we have the ability to RSS that page? But if it's static can there be changes to it?

Joseph Miller said...

Good questions. First, the shared button is at the bottom of each article you read. Click that button for every article you think is worth sharing. After you are done reading articles and pressing "share", then click the GoogeleReader button on the upper right to go back to your main Reader page. On the upper left on the main Reader page you will see where it says" "Home", "All Items", "Starred Items", and "Shared Items". Click "Shared Items". There you will see four options: (1) a web url to share, (2) an RSS feed of your shared items, (3) email to friends, or (4) put a button on your page.

If you want students to subscribe to your shared items (or their colleagues) they will do the following: (1) get an aggregator (Google Reader is great and Bloglines just released a new version that looks sweet) and (2) paste the feed link into their aggregator. Here is my feedlink: http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/02094346709579089414/state/com.google/broadcast

They can also just paste the web url and that works too.