Keeping Up With Google Reader

Part of the UMW student participation credit in ds106 is commenting on the work of other students in the class (you are doing that, correct?). But with all of the blogs in this class, and more among the open participants of the main site, how to you know where to go? It would be insane to visit every blog on a regular basis.

Be smart! use the syndication tools that your blogs automatically create and an RSS viewer It provides an easy way to quickly see what is new across many sites without even visiting them. I made a screencast for how to do this and how to import batches of blog feeds:

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Using Google Reader
Of course the starting point is having a free google account, each comes with a free suite of tools including Google Reader.

You can add blogs to Google Reader one at a time, say... like this one? Copy the URL http://ds106.us, click the SUBSCRIBE button, and paste it that URL. This creates one link that shows all of the recent new content on the ds106 site. But that is a lot of stuff. You may just want to follow the blogs from your class, or maybe fellow UMW students, or just the open online participants.

There is a more efficient way, and it uses another file format structured for subscriptions, OPML, and have a new tool that can automatically generate these subscription files. We will provide the OPML links from the main ds106 site. Look for class sections in the right sidebar, and from any of those yo will find a link on the right to download an OPML file.

To import these in Google Reader, go to Settings (under the gear menu in the top right), and click on the Import tab. Choose the file you had downloaded, upload it, and SHAZAM! You have just subscribed to all blogs in that group.

By having them in one folder, you can either scan all at once, or click an individual blog url to read just one person's updates. If you click on the title link from the main pane, you will go to that blog post, which you will need to do to add comments.

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I prefer the compact view, where I see just the blog post titles, and ones on bold are ones I have not seen. To toggle this mode, click the right button (stacked lines) in your reader main view toolbar.

This is how we keep up on all your work, and this is what you should use as a basis to choose where to spend your comment energy. Google Reader helps you with the ds106 ABCs- Always Be Commenting

For a basic overview of what makes this work, see the Common Craft video, Google Reader in Plain English

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