I'm Glad Google Reader is Gone

Last year I used Google Reader to keep track of all of my students' #20time blogs. I created folders sorted by section number and last name. Now Google Reader is gone, and I couldn't be happier.

Let's back up to CUE Rockstar Tahoe where my love affair with a post Google Reader began. One of the greatest parts of CUE Rockstar is the two-hour lunch. These lunches that allow for extreme collaboration may be the single most valuable parts of Rockstar events. One day I got to spend almost two hours brainstorming with Alice Chen about 20% Time. We talked about how we manage the blogs we assign with our projects. I told her that I was sad about Google Reader going away, and I thought I would create a form for students to fill out that would link to their most current posts. Chen, in her usual brilliance suggested that I include a paragraph textbox so students would paste the written content of the blog into the form itself.

The result: all of my students' blog posts for the whole year on one large spreadsheet I could easily scan. This process is MUCH faster than clicking through scores of blogs every week. Thanks, Alice. You're brilliant, and you've given me hours of my life back.

Google reader? Good riddance.