Using Feedly to Monitor Student Blogs

Students have created their blogs, and have begun posting.  The plan is for them to post to them every other week, and provide comments on each other's blogs during non posting weeks.    Our school uses a learning management system called Canvas as an intranet of sorts for teacher pages, homework posting, online discussion boards, and submitting assignments (among other things). I used this system for them to submit their blog urls.  Another way would have been to create a Google Form that they could go to and paste in their urls, which in turn would give me a spreadsheet with all of their urls organized neatly by name.  I actually think I might just do that next year.  

From my end as a reader though, I don't really want to go to Canvas every time I want to link to their blogs, or see if they've posted recently.  I want to go to one single place.  That's where Feedly comes in:

Feedly is basically and RSS reader that conglomerates all of the most recent posts of website you view on a regular basis.  Why waste time going to each and every one of your favorite websites to see what's new, when you can go to one place and see all of the new posts organized however you choose?  It's easy to set up. Once you create an account, you can easily access new posts by logging in via the Feedly website, or by using the Feedly mobile or desktop app.  Once in, you can see which websites have had recent posts, and link directly to them, or just read the content in Feedly and quickly move on to the next. It's really handy.

Here you can see that I connected all of my student blogs into my own Feedly.  The numbers on the right of the left hand column indicate the number of unread posts.

At first glance it looks like I need to talk to students about including some pictures in their posts.  Having pictures can be a nice way to pique view interest.

This is a great tool for me to see real quick who's posting and who's not.  It's also a great tool for students to use, and I plan on sharing it with them next week.  For them, they can use it to track their peers' blogs without having to go to Canvas.  What's more, they can use it to track information they're seeking for their actual projects.  20% time seems like a lot of time, but it's really not. I'm realizing how fast it goes, and you want your time finding information to be as efficient as possible.  Using Feedly, or other RSS readers, to bring the information to you is a huge time saver.