Google Reader- Starred and Shared Items

If you use Google Reader as your RSS Aggregator, you might or might not be familiar with the “Starred Items” “Shared Items” feature.

Although I neglect these two features sometimes, when it is hard enough to get though all my my feeds anyway, they have grown on me and I am using them more and more.

The settings in Google Reader are set to only show “updated” feeds. This means, when I read an item it will be marked “as read” and not show again.

When I find a post, that I want to go back to later and I don’t want it to disappear into the vast ocean of “read items”… never to be found again… unless I remember who wrote it… or what it was about…or can come up with defining keywords to be able to search for it… then I click on the outline of the star that is to the left of the posts title in my Google Reader.

I have started using this feature heavily when I read my feeds on my iPhone. Your starred items are for your eyes only. Nobody knows what or how many items you star. I usually  go back to the starred items to bookmark the posts for my del.icio.us account or to clip quotes for my Google Notebook.

The other feature I am starting to rely and use is:

There are two aspects to the shared items

1. People that share items with me
   1. Others have to “choose” to share items with you
2. People I share items with
   1. Add people to share with by going through your Gmail contact list or inviting them via e-mail

When you find a post, that you feel will be of benefit to others, choose between “Share” or “Share with note”

I have not used the share with notes option, but am benefiting from the brief notes that others add to their shared items… I need get used to doing the same. Great exercise in summarizing the main points or the reasons why you felt compelled to share this post.   If you decide to share it with a note simply choose the option at the end of the post in Google Reader, then type your note in the pop up window.

Once shared, the post will be placed in your “Shared items” folder.

The idea is to be responsible and share only great posts (in your own opinion), while the starred items can be as silly and unimportant to anyone but you as you want them to be. When a friend has shared an item with you, you can star the item as any other normal post, if you find the content important to your own learning.

Google will also give you a URL link to all your shared items, which in turn has an RSS feed. Here is Langwitches’ Shared Items.

Google Starred and Shared items—> just another way of organizing all the information.

Custom Google Search Engine

Yesterday, during our last technology professional development workshop of the year, I introduced a group of our elementary school faculty to the concept of a custom Google Search Engine. Everyone present was invited to be a collaborator and created (if they did not have one) or signed into their google account. I created a step-by-step tutorial for adding a URL to our custom search engine. We are also encouraging faculty to start adding sites through out the summer months, when planning for next school year.

Dear Faculty,

In an elementary school setting we are hesitant to go to a search engine, like Google or Yahoo, and simply type in a keyword or phrase in front of our class. You will receive millions of search results. It is a lottery to click on a link. You cannot be assured that the website you are about to display will be age- appropriate in text, graphics, videos, advertisement and content for your students. We also worry about our students when they are at home and needing research material for projects and homework assignments.

You are invited to collaborate in growing our very own San Jose Episcopal Day School Google SEARCH ENGINE. This search engine will be accessible for students by going to http://www….
Students will be typing in their search keywords and phrases and will receive ONLY results from websites that have been added by collaborators of the our faculty . By adding relevant and pre-selected websites to our custom search engine, you are aiding your students to focus on content for their research, rather than quantity of information. They will become more efficient web searchers in a safe environment.

Please follow the steps to add a URL (website address, that starts with http://) to our custom search engine.

1- Go to http://www.google.com and click on sign in

2- Type in your e-mail and password, then click “sign in”.

3- After you signed in, click on “more”

4- Then click on “even more”

5- Click on “Custom Search”

6- Click on “Manage your existing search engines

7- Click on “Control Panel”

8- Click on “Include sites”

9- Open up a new tab or window in your Internet browser.
Go to the website you would like to add to SJEDS Custom Search Engine. Highlight the URL (http://www …) and right click on the URL to then copy the address. You can also use CTRL-C on your keyboard to copy after the URL is highlighted. Go back to the search engine and right click into the text box, then choose paste. You can also use CTRL-V on your keyboard to paste the URL after you clicked in the text box. After the URL is visible in the text box click on the “save” button.

10- Congratulations! You just added a valuable site to our search engine!

Remember that this search engine will be only as useful as the sites that are contributed by the faculty. If you are planning for your students to research a certain topic or subject and want to give them a more directed research focus, be sure to add YOUR pre-selected sites to our search engine.

Added thought:

If you want to make adding a URL to your Google Search Engine even easier, you can add a Google Marker button to your FireFox or Internet Explorer toolbar. That will automatically launch a annotation window. You must be logged into your google account though.  I might install this on all our teachers’ computers.

Tidbits of Information

In January, I attended a session by Hall Davidson at FETC titled "Revenge of the Digital Immigrant ". After 3 months, I remember th examples of how Davidson demonstrated that the new generation learns with shorter and shorter clips/segments of information. In order to get their point across, commercials decades ago used to be several minutes. Nowadays they only need to be a few seconds long. As teachers we also know that students will retain information better and for longer periods of time, if it administered in small doses and frequently, rather than in one chunk and in one sitting.

Recently, I have discovered Worldview for my iPhone

WORLDview for iPhone lists facts about countries around the world. Categorized by continent, view all countries or pick a random country. Find data such as the capital, continent, coordinates, basic history, important phone numbers and more.

I make it a point of reading about a random country each day. Just a quick check where it is located in the world, what its capital is and a little background information. Did you know that Sierra Leone’s capital is Freetown and is a neighboring country of Liberia in Africa? Those quick tidbits seem to be sticking well for me. I still can locate the Glorioso islands off the coast of Madagascar and Guadaloupe is an island-country not "too" far from Florida, even days after!!

Maybe we need to take more advantage of quick tidbit moments for our students and in our own learning. Maybe that is part of the power of Twitter: Short bits of information. @lbilak on Twitter has started a Spanish Tweet of the Day, which I think is a SUPER idea.

I will make it a point to post some random quick tidbits about languages and global awareness on my blog every once in a while, maybe that information will stick with someone?

Here is my first one- agotada – exhausted or feeling drained