RSS, student blog stream, and Inoreader

Table of contents:

• Introduction
• Students’s blog set-up
• Instructor’s set-up
• Exporting the “blog stream”
• In Canvas
• How to use in teaching
• Want to do even more with Inoreader?

Introduction

I like using blogs for student work, and generally students get to see the value of working in the open as well.

When we talk about Open Education Resources (OER), one of the statements that’s up for discussion is “I feel like the work I do in courses really makes a difference.” The response from students varies wildly. Some see assignments as contributing to their degree, by getting a grade, and thus it makes a difference. Others see that very move as something that doesn’t make a difference, because most of their assignments are only seen by their instructor and then disappear in a (digital) drawer that might as well be an oubliette.

I’ll write in future posts about some of the projects students have created as assignments in my courses to combat that sense of futility, but blogs are an easy way to have student work move beyond the one-way (if you’re lucky, two-way) street from student, to instructor, to the oubliette. It’s easier for everyone to share work, and students maintain ownership of their work after a course concludes as well.

Students’ blog set-up

Students set up their blog in the very first week of classes, all the way from installing WordPress on their Domain of One’s Own space to creating their first blog post with an image, including Alt text. You can find the full instructions in this assignment.

Tip: If you don’t have a Reclaim Hosting initiative on your campus, you can still use blogs! Blogger and WordPress run free versions, but with some ads.

I also specifically ask to create a category that is the same as the course number. As more and more of my colleagues use blogs in their courses, we found out that we occasionally get to see each other’s assignments in student portfolios. Creating different categories is enough for us to keep things separated.

Other than that, I leave students to experiment with themes, subdomains, and however they wish to present information. I may occasionally point out that a theme is not friendly on the eye due to colours or an excessively busy background, but true to the spirit of the project, it is a Domain of their own so they call the shots 😉

Instructor’s set-up

Previously I had a list of all the student websites on a page in Canvas, but as I am increasingly liberating myself from the #elemess and relying more on blogs, I needed a simpler workflow than “click on link, check if the posts are there.”

I learned about Inoreader from @OnlineCrsLady (Laura Gibbs) around the same time as I learned about how she uses the randomizer for peer-feedback on writing assignments, and it all clicked into place. It also is a great RSS reader I use for my own personal needs.

Most functionality you need to keep track of your students’ posts would come for free with any RSS reader: add the RSS feed from the category (not the whole blog!) and you will see when they publish a new post. I place all student blogs from one course in a single folder, so I can easily keep track of posts and “batch” my work together. This is particularly useful when I create the randomizer, as described in an earlier blog post.

All of this is available for free in Inoreader, and most RSS feed aggregators.

Exporting the “blog stream”

But I pay $49.99 for the Pro plan… because that allows me to do something really nifty that I learned from Laura: grabbing the HTML snippet to display a stream of blogs inside a webpage – including Canvas. It is much more interactive and visually attractive, at least to me – but if it feels less like “grading” and more like “fun reading what students are up to”, it’s more likely to get feedback!

It’s very easy to set up!

Once I have set up a folder, I click on the little cogwheel next to Feeds:

and up pops a “Content” overview panel. I next click on “Folders” and can choose from several options:

Here “HTML clip” is what I’m after. Once I click on that, this screen with options pops up:

I enable the Link at the top, and can now tweak the settings, but the only change I make is to make the iframe much taller, so I change “height” to 1800:

<iframe width="100%" height="1800" src="https://www.inoreader.com/stream/user/1004857363/tag/HST124/view/html?cs=m" frameborder="0" tabindex="-1"></iframe>

Since I have maximum 20 students per course, I can leave the “Items per page” at 20 and still see everybody’s post in the HTML output, but increasing the height means the area on the webpage decreases the amount of scrolling.

This semester students haven’t been adding images to blog posts due to the nature of the assignment, but when you ask for images, they show up in the HTML output and that makes for a more colourful view. In the blog stream, students can click on the image or the title of the post to go to the page.

In Canvas

You can also add this HTML clip in a Canvas page. Toggle the editing window to HTML code and copy-paste all the code with the iframe tags, and hey presto: your Canvas page just went from drab to fab!

How to use in teaching

Over the course of the semester, students often find they have a favourite writer, or want to follow how somebody’s project is coming along. Once they learn where the blogs are, they are no longer dependent on the randomizer, but can actively go looking for updates from their fellow students.

I also write a weekly post for each class in which I collect my general feedback on the major themes that come through from their posts that week, and add that to the stream, so I am more of a fellow participant (“guide on the side”) than a “sage on the stage” type of instructor: my blog post is just one of many.

We (students and instructor alike) can also easily show people outside the course how the work we do fits into the overall course, and how varied our interpretations of assignments are.

Want to do even more with Inoreader?

If you want to learn more about how to leverage the many different things Inoreader can do to help you manage a digital workflow, check out the phenomenal series Laura Gibbs created in the summer of 2020: Be There with Blogging – Some of the screenshots may be different as Inoreader keeps evolving, but we’re both happy to help you puzzle through a digital workflow to help you and your students be part of the twenty-first century with a networked blog!