Using a News-Reader

Your blog produces a feed.

Sorry to be the one to break that to you. No, actually this is a good thing. Because blogs are essentially subscription-based (i.e. people who use RSS news-readers like Google Reader can receive updates each time you create a new post), you can use the subscription feed your blog produces to keep track of your students. This is going to be a little two-part post/lesson. Part one: How subscriptions work and how to use a news-reader. Part two: How to monitor blog use through a burning service.

Ok. Let's start with the whole idea of new-readers. Basically a news-reader is a portal through which all of your blog subscriptions are managed. So, say you find yourself say in this election cycle always reading Daily Dish and First Read and any of the numerous blogs on nytimes.com. Isn't it kinda time-consuming always having to go to the websites and find the new information you are looking for? Instead, you can use a news-reader (also called an aggregator) to cull through all the new posts on your most-watched blogs and compile them in one place. To do this, you need a news-reader and you need to subscribe to the blog's feed.

If you've been following this blog, you've likely already set up a Google account. And when you did that, you in fact got hooked into the Google Reader service (which is their news-feed aggregator). Just click on the 'reader' tab in Google and you will see how the reader works. It's basically set up to look like an email account, except instead of email you receive news from blogs you've subscribed to.

So, now let's go and subscribe to some blogs. If you like, you can go ahead and start with DIGLATIN! Click on the orange broadcast icon in the top left corner of the blog. This will take you to a page where you can choose which reader to use (in addition to Google, there are many choices from big names like Yahoo to more boutique readers like Pageflakes, but they all basically do the same thing [Ed. - Advanced readers, please refrain from flaming me on this issue; instead work off your angst at the fact that I would dare equate Yahoo and Pageflakes by going off on a quest with a few buddies to take down a dragon with your level-65 Warcraft gnome warrior... we'll get to advanced issues down the road; this is a post for folks who just want to learn how to subscribe to blogs]. But, I digress.

Ok. So that's how a news-reader works. Now, for each blog you regularly read, you can set a subscription and receive all your news in one place.