The Google Reader journey continues...

My young Google Reader

A major focus of my inquiry this week has been to become more comfortable with Google Reader, and the functions I can use in it.  My primary guide for this has been Will Richardson's book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms.  This book has extensive information about RSS and how to use Google Reader, and he provides excellent step-by-step instructions for how to accomplish some of the more useful features.  Unfortunately as I have discovered this week, with Google's attempt to take over social networking with Google+, a feature I was very interested in using has been removed.  I will describe the feature regardless in case someone from Google decides to read this post.  The previous version of Google Reader, which Richardson described in his book, allowed user to "share" articles from any of the blogs or subscriptions on Google Reader.  I could then provide a URL for a site which would have all of my shared posts listed.  Someone else could have even subscribed to that page with RSS.  I was very excited about this concept because it would have created such an easy resource to share with colleagues, and a place to have discussion about articles.  I suppose Google+ is meant to be the place to do this, but I think this is an area where simple may be more efficient.
After realizing that feature was gone or until my creativity helps me to figure out another way to do this, I proceeded through my list of other features to investigate.  First I wanted to play with tags.  Any article I come across can be easily labelled with tags or a quick word to help organize the article for future reference or searches.  I am very interested in the use of smartphones at school so any article I come across about smartphones I apply the smartphone tag to it and now I can group all of those articles into the same place.  Tags are nothing new and fancy in the world of Web 2.0, but I have never taken the time to use them so I am excited to organize my Reader world a little better.
Next on the list was creating a list of starred items.  Often when scrolling though Google Reader, I read a headline that looks interesting, but I do not have the time to read the whole article at that moment.  I can "star" this item as a favorite, and them pull up that list of starred items when I have more time to read them.  Another useful way to organize the hundreds of articles that appear in my Google Reader everyday.
Finally, I happened upon Reader Play while selecting random features to learn more about Google Reader.  I have always had a difficult time reading text on a website, and I have been so pleased lately with the feature in Safari that takes a website and turns it into more reader friendly text.  The Reader Play feature on Google Reader follows in this concept.  While Google Reader is a classic vertically oriented, dark text on light background website.  Reader Play takes the sites from Reader and allows me to scroll through the separate articles horizontally, and the text is white on a dark background.  It probably does not sound too innovative but it makes sense when you try it.  Reader Play can be accessed by selecting the Feed Settings drop box.

The look of Reader Play

As with all good inquiry, just when I think I have something figured out, a new path opens and I find myself spending the night figuring out how to use a new feature and whether it is actually worth using.  As a side note, while typing this post, I realized I should utilize the benefits that a good image can offer so I asked the question "how do I take a screen capture on a Mac?"  A quick search took me to a website that gave me the simple instructions I needed.  

Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.


Admin.  (March 11, 2011).  Print screen Mac.  How to do print screen on a Mac.  Retrieved November 13, 2011, from http://www.printscreenmac.com/.