How do you read Blogs? Shrook?

We have all heard about blogs. Some of us blog. Some of us think it’s taboo to blog. I recently did a poll of 8 teachers I was working with and 1 out of 8 blogged. Not bad! But generally, I get the feeling everyone reads a blog by web surfing into that page. You don’t really know whether there is an update on that page, you probably have it as a bookmark and when you have really nothing to do or just to take your eyes off marking assignments, you click and see if there is an update. As I am blogging now, my wife has just informed me that our family blog is now going to hit the 600th post! Amazing! And we actually have an active audience reading and I find this most conducive for a learning classroom.

So things to find out:
1. Do you know that you can search in Google under BLOGS and you might just find your name there on someone’s blog?
2. Do you know that there are different blog web systems? Most people are used to Blogger. I am using a different one called WordPress.

I will talk about blogging one of these days with text, video, mobile blogging, etc but for now, it’s HOW you read them. Boils down to something called RSS. You might have seen it. We make use of that and in different applications (called RSS Readers), it will display all the blogs you want to see and whenever there is ANYONE who posts something new, it turns up automatically and it indicates it (as if there is a new email that has arrived!) That is so convenient, like when you are a teacher and trying to read a student’s blog. I know a teacher who has her students do reflections in a blog and she has to read them one by one and she can never tell if the page is updated. Here’s a RSS Reader to the rescue! SHROOK.

It is a free reader and I like this one as it is simple and quick to use. In the case of the teacher, she found her kids doing so much more than pen and paper and she can see in her SHROOK if there is a new posting and she can group it in the application as each class. Brilliant!

Download it here.