Google is killing Google Reader

Photo from Venture Beat

Google has announced that Google Reader is shutting down.

I'm not impressed.

I've been using Google Reader on a daily basis for years. For me, it was my way of collecting my favorite education blogs in a single, simple place. Reader was never flashy, but it never needed to be. Over the years, RSS and Google Reader have become a part of my learning.

@joe_bower I use Reader daily too. It is part of the architecture of my learning.
— Alan Stange (@stangea) March 14, 2013

I know some people claim that social media like Twitter makes RSS obsolete. That's nice for them, but let me be crystal clear: I love Twitter but for me it does not replace Google Reader and RSS. I believe this tweet says it all:

Google Reader is to Twitter as a well-labeled filing cabinet is to a bag of insane cats.
— Scott Stein (@jetscott) March 14, 2013

This video describes pretty much how I feel. Careful, there are swears in the subtitles.

Ultimately, I'm left looking for an alternative. It would appear that Feedly is a potential replacement. I added their Chrome extension on my MacBook Air and their app on my iPhone. Plus, they claim that when Google Reader goes down they will seamlessly transition to their own service. 

I'll let you know if Feedly makes the cut.

My learning and Social Networking

I am a teacher, but I'm a learner first.

My head spins when I think back upon how my learning has been influenced by social networking.

• Google Reader: I don't need someone to tell me what to read. Traditional newspapers and magazines just don't make much sense to me. Who gives them the right to tell me what to read? Why do they get to pick what's on the front page? Google Reader allows me to tailor my own personal newspaper with the RSS feeds from my favorite blogs.

• Twitter: It's so important to find like-minded colleagues, but the laws of probability tell us that you have a better chance finding them if you look amongst billions of people virtually than a handful of people physically. Our workplaces simply can not expose us to a large enough population - Twitter has provided me with the opportunity to find my tribe. 

• Diigo: I come across a lot of information in a day. In fact, too much. Quite often, I can't read everything I'd like to but Diigo allows me to bookmark all my stuff with tags. In other words, Diigo is my virtual bookshelf where I place my stuff, and on that bookshelf, I have labels that allow me to easily retrieve anything I've come across. A real life example of this: for the last few years, I've tagged stuff about math, and for the first time in my career I now have the opportunity to teach math, so when I went back to my Diigo, I had 20+ resources to look at. As I read through my stuff, I knew that I had not read them when I tagged them then, but I was sure glad I had them now. 

• Posterous: I use posterous to capture excerpts, pictures and videos that I come across that I wish to comment on. Often I might get around to blogging about these in a more sophisticated manner; however, I really like the idea of sharing with others my thoughts on the stuff I come across on a daily basis. I can think of a handful of people whom I would love to have a live subscription to their daily research, viewing, reading and musings.

When I share this with others who have yet to engage in social networking, their first reaction tends to be something like this "How do you have time for all this stuff?" While I will I agree that I do spend time and effort at this, and that getting this social networking thing "figured out" can initially take a lot of both, it ultimately is one of the cheapest, most efficient and effective ways of gathering such a quantity and quality of information to support my learning.

And it's fun.

Google Reader

I was talking to a good friend of mine the other day, and we got to talking about blogs. He told me that he reads about 3 different blogs on a regular basis. I told him that I had about 35.

We were both shocked. He couldn't figure out how I kept track of so many sources, and I couldn't figure out how he didn't have more sources to pull from.

In the end, I explained that I don't read everything that I subscribe to, but he had to admit that he had to artificially limit his number to 3 in order to keep his sources managable. The difference between us was that I had a filter and he didn't.

The filter I use is Google Reader.

I shared with him how Google Reader helps me to manage my time with so many blogs. Rather than having to go to each blog to read the information, Google Reader allows me to subscribe via RSS feed and then all my blogs come to me in one place.

I always told myself that I would keep my number of blog subscriptions to a minimum, but it turns out that there are so many different sources of information that I want to be privy to that I need Google Reader to help streamline all my sources.

I have the Mobile RSS app on my iPhone too, and it rocks. I keep informed without wasting much of my time actually navigating to and from sources.

Needless to say, he now uses Google Reader and subscribes to more than 3 blogs.

What am I reading?

After reading Scott McLeod's Dangerously Irrelevant blog entry about what he was reading on-line, I thought I would share what I am reading.

Here is a list of blogs that I have subscribed to with Google Reader:

• Parents for Real Learning First
• A Passion for Teaching
• Bridging Differences
• Core Knowledge Foundation
• D.C. Schools Insider
• Dangerously Irrelevant
• Dan Pink
• Educational Policy Blog
• Education Week
• Elementary School Leadership
• Free Technology for Teachers
• GFBrandenburg's Blog
• RailsTips
• Joanne Jacobs
• Jock Mackenzie
• Kare Givers
• Learning Matters
• Public School Insights
• National Journal Online
• NYC Public School Parents
• PDK International
• Schools Matter
• Seth's Blog
• The Answer Sheet
• Stephen Murgatroyd
• Two Writing Teachers
• Will Richardson's posterous
• Yong Zhao