Edu-(Tech)niques

Well I’ve gone through the 5 steps of loss and grief and have crash landed at acceptance. I have accepted that Google Reader is going. It will be no more. Gonzo. Non-living.

So after the initial flurry of manic RSS reader website searching and websites like theoldreader and newsblur being bombarded with anxious news guzzlers, the dust has finally settled and we can now pass judgement on which one is better.

Feedly is free and does the job.

It is reminiscent of Google Reader without being a total clone and has the functionality you need in a reader. It imports directly from Google Reader and promises to copy all your feeds over when Google Reader closes in July 2013.

So what have been the advantages of all this?

Well, I’ve had to take a good long look at my media consumption. I had two Google Reader accounts; one for my school Gmail and one for my personal Gmail. That’s just way too much backwards and forwards and way too much information to get through. So I’ve had to consolidate and cull my news intake. I must have had 150 or so blogs in my school Gmail account. I went through each one and assessed its value to me and either gave it the thumbs up or thumbs down. The account is now empty. Some made it over to Feedly, some didn’t.

In Feedly today, sits my personal and professional interests all in one place and all edited down to a manageable size. For now.

Now you know what interests me.

As you can see it’s very much like Reader in that it tells you how many unread posts you have within each category along with a plethora of visual options you can have as you go in to each feed.

As full articles:

As a panel-type view:

As a hybrid list-image view:

As a list view:

The concise little menu bar at the top of each page

The first four go through each view as above.
The check marks as read.
The cog gives you a myriad of options like so:

The circle arrow refreshes the feed.
Finally, the right arrow goes to the next feed or category.

Anyway, I’m still learning at this point but I’m grateful of the opportunity to take a good look at what my consumption of media should be. There is such a thing as too much. We do need to step back and re-assess and regulate our media diet from time to time.

I came away from a recent conference which focused on using one “platform/toolset” for every job. Imaginable. Even if it didn’t really work as well as another tool. My takeaway from that conference was that I don’t want to be that type of educator. Ever. And you shouldn’t either.

If a certain tool doesn’t do the job even though we really really want it to then don’t use it and find an alternative. I’ll give a prime example of this that just happened to me this week.

We are nearing student led conferences here and we needed a sign-up form for parents to book an allotted time. We only wanted three spaces available per hour. I got cracking on a Google Doc. Couldn’t do Google Forms as that would entail having to sort out the entries after the fact and also parents would not know if all the slots were taken or not. I tend to turn to Google Apps as it is very very good at a lot of things and I really want to build the culture of using it and getting used to it in my school.

Here was Student Led Conference Sign-Up Form Version 1.0

Nothing wrong with that. It’s easy on the eye and there are three cells for every class per hour just like we wanted. Then we got thinking about how much better it could be. The major problem was that every cell was editable by anyone with access to the document. This left us open to mistakes, accidents, slips of the mouse/keyboard. Basically, the tool was not giving us any assurance that the job we wanted it to do would actually work 100%. Sure, we could have backtracked any mistakes by the end user with “revision history” but why should we have to rely on fixing things when the tool shouldn’t give the end-user the chance to make mistakes.

In the meantime, our principal got an invite from our High School to schedule her son in for his student led conference. They were using something else, a third party website (www.signupgenius.com) specifically tailored to scheduling meetings with defined slots. Let’s do this. After an hour I had thrashed out a template and had tested to see if it met our needs. I passed it on to our VP and Principal to see if they felt the same. They did.

Here is Student Led Conference Sign Up Form Version 2.0:

As you can see it is made for the job at hand. There are defined number of slots and once those slots are full then nobody can mess with that.

I’m writing this as the form has gone live and already we had a parent sign up for all 3 slots in a given hour! No problem as administrator I can delete two of those and those slots are made available again. It’s exactly those types of mistakes that we didn’t want to happen in a more openly editable tool like our Google Doc Version 1.0 form. To be honest, though, parents who have made appointments and wish to change them have found it difficult to do so (it can be done) so thinking about the Google Doc signup form version 1.0 this would have been an easier way for them to change their timed appointments. We will sit down at the end of it all and reflect and assess what we can do better next time. Always learning.

So while I was going through this process I thought back to the rigidity and inflexibility that some companies would like you, as an educator, to adopt in your teaching. Our school relies on Google Apps every day for communication and collaboration (for starters). I tend to want to use Google as a solution for everything and, in most cases, it works perfectly well! In this instance we found something that was more suited to the job at hand. This is the right way and the real way problems need to be solved. We should be constantly scanning the horizon for solutions that we do not have yet. We should not rely on “platforms” or “software suites” to solve everything. We should be flexible as educators so that our students can develop the same mentality when it comes to problem solving.

We head down to Tasmania this week for Minechat. Donelle and her students show us around their (mostly student administered) world. These guys do an amazing job with managing their server. People who administer their own server know that it is not the easiest job in the world to keep everyone happy and on the straight and narrow! Amazing work you guys!

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So can you work with Minecraft if you don’t have a network in your school? Miles tells us about his experiences with Minecraft in his school in Canada!

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Eric Walker shows us around his amazing middle school humanities Minecraft world where he has numerous areas for student learning. Sit back and enjoy the journey.

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