Blog overload: Use Feedly to manage student blogs

image courtesy feedly.com

Teachers have limited time to read and assess student work. When you add in student blogging with all the accompanying posts and comments, the amount of work can increase as well. What teachers need is one place to view student blogs, instead of hunting down and bookmarking each URL. Blogging platforms such as Kidblog and Edublogs include classroom management tools to do just that.

Blogger, however, lacks those tools. In a previous post I described how you can add links to a blogroll to make that easier. However, if you are a secondary teacher with multiple periods a blogroll also becomes unwieldy as that list becomes longer.

Another alternative is to use an RSS reader such as Feedly. Feedly is a free service that gathers all the blogs you follow into one location. You can group student blogs by class and quickly see how many unread posts a blog has. There is also a mobile version for your smartphone or tablet. I use Feedly all the time for the many educational blogs that I follow. Here is a screen shot so you can see what that looks like.

The first thing you'll want to do is gather the URLs for your student blogs. Probably the easiest way to do that is simply use a Google form to gather those URLs into one spreadsheet that you can then use to copy/paste them into your Feedly.

Next go to the Feedly website and create your free account. You can use your existing Google login to do that.

Silvia Tolisano, blogger advocate extraordinaire, has directions for adding your student blog URLs in her post The Blogging Kraken: How to Keep Up with All Your Students Blogs. Follow her directions, making sure you name each link with the student's names. Group them by period and you'll be super organized when it comes time to read your students' blogs.