Feeding on Blogs

Organizing Workflow RSS Feeds and YouTube Channels

To start I was having students email me or message me through Canvas to let me know they had posted to their blog spot. I also encouraged them to share the posts via Google+. I am not sure of how much of a presence Shenandoah has on Google+ but I was hoping that others would see the posts and comment or at least +1 the post. That system is working and I will keep it in place as a means of notification. I will also plan to use the message to provide feedback to students. Since I want them to open the blogs up for others to read, I did not want to leave the course specific feedback in the comments under the post.

Following each other's work

So how then to get the students to follow one another's blogs? I decided that I would refer back to an older system of tracking/following updates to resources like blogs...the RSS feed! Chrome Web Store has several options for feed readers. I chose one simply called feeder from feeder.co. It was fairly easy going to install and add the blogs into the feed. One variable was whether or not the subscribe link was located at the bottom of the blogspot page. One constant was to copy and paste the URL from the blog's home page.

This has been helpful in making my work flow more efficient. With a glance to the top of my browser to where the extension icons live, I can see if any of the blogs have been updated. Clicking on the icon will open a list of all the blogs I have subscribed to in the feeder. If the blog had been updated there would be a small circle with the number of updated posts. I plan to share the doc with all the blog spots with the class and
walk through a demonstration of setting up a feed reader to make following the work of others a little easier.

Conquering Zoom

Rendering a 150 minute video is always going to be time consuming and one has to be delibertae in the steps to stop the recording, end the session and save the video. It is always a little worrisome when you close the Zoom window and wait, sometimes for several long seconds for the video rendering dialogue appears and then watching the progress bar s l o w l y move across the window towards 100%.  File upload to Canvas seemed to be the solution BUT the file storage limit maxed out on me after the second session. Plan B was to set up a YouTube Channel for the course, upload the video to YouTube...yet another progress bar! Then use the embed code to post the video to the Canvas course page which requires working in the HTML editor and making some adjustments to the size of the size of the thumbnail image (it plays beautifully be the way). I would like to edit thhe video into segments and possible include some title slides and topic call out slides but two progress bars might be my limit on this project at this point. I am wondering if I can then subscribe to the YouTube Channel through the feed reader!?!?!