Rod’s EdTech Review: Publishing with Google Tools Module Guide

Publishing with Google Tools Module

In this module you are going to use some of the Google blogging tools to find useful blogs to read, subscribe to their feeds, and even publish your own blog and website.

Google Tools Explored in this module:

Blogger
Google Blog Search
Google Reader
Google Alert
Google Page Creator

Learning Objectives:

Find useful blogs that have postings that would want to read on a regular basis.
Setup a blog of your own that you can use to publish your own thoughts, opinions or commentaries on an area of your interest.
Setup two tools that will act as agents for you to alert you to new postings on selective blogs or just generally on the Internet, as well as make it easy for you to read the postings.
Create an HTML based website using Google Page Creator

Resources Required:

A Google or Gmail account login.

Directions

Blogger

This module guide is a posting in one of my blogs in Blogger, one of the most popular blogging tools around. Google acquired Blogger awhile back and recently it just came out of Beta release. Explore the features of this blog. Can you find the archive of past postings, organized both by date and topic?
This blog is one that I started a few months ago to post my views and reviews about Ed Tech. Post a comment at the bottom of this post and let us know who useful you may find this particular blog useful, or suggestions on how I could improve it.
Think of a topic within Ed Tech that you would find useful and enter a keyword or two into the Search Blog tool at the top and left of the page and see if I have posted something about that. Did I?
There are thousands of blogs out on the net and many on Blogger along. Click on the
Next Blog>> link at the top and centre and take a look at another blog. Would you find this one useful? You may need to click on the Next Blog>> again.
Google Blog Search
Now lets search all of the blogs out there for some useful posts. Go to the Google Blog Search and enter in a key word or two describing a topic you are interested in
reading about. Find at least two blogs that you will want to subscribe to later in this module and bookmark their URLs.
Google Alerts
New blogs are created every minute and there may be one that is useful to you that gets created tomorrow. Well, you could always do another Blog Search to find it but better yet, use the Google Alert tool to let Google let you know. Go to Google Alerts and enter in a keyword or two you would like to be alerted about, and your email address. You may want to change the other options or just leave them as their defaults. If you are already signed in with your Google account you won't need to enter your email address. You can have as many alerts as you wish.
Google Reader
Hopefully you now have 2 or 3 blogs identified that you would like to read on a regular basis. We are now going to set up Google Reader to help you monitor and read the postings on these sites. If you would like a list of blogs that I subscribe to see below. Go to Google Reader and sign in with your Google login. As you create your Reader for the first time, you may choice to add some of the feeds offered but it is up to you.
Most blogs have an RSS feed when will allow Google Reader to automatically check for new postings and present them to you to read. It is easy to add these to your Subscription list in Reader because you just need to click on Add Subscription and paste in the URL from the blog site and let Google Reader set up the feed connection. Add 2 or 3 blog sites subscriptions to your list. Feel free to add any of the ones I have listed below.
If you get a lot of blogs subscriptions, you can go to the Manage Subscriptions tool where you can set up various folders, tags and other tools for organizing your subscriptions. Now take some time to actually read some of the postings. As you do, notice how Reader keeps track of what you have read. It will do this even if you access Reader from multiple computers because the information is stored on the server and not your computer. You can use the tags feature and some of the advanced publishing features to share selected postings with your class.
Blogger
Would you now like to create your own blog? Go to the Blogger start page and sign in with your Google account. Review the information about blogs presented here.
If you are ready to create your blog click on the big orange arrow that say Create your blow now and follow the directions of this wizard. Feel free to just create test blog, it is free. Or if you have figured out a purpose for you blog, create one and start publish your postings.
Google Page Creator
Blogs are different than Websites and you may want to build a website using
the Google Page Creator tool. Click
here to access my website built in Google Page Creator. What is nice about
this tool, is that it is free, no HTML knowledge required and you get 100MB
of space.
Click here to start your own website using
this tool. To get started, simply click on Create a New Page button and follow
the directions on the new page. Explore the tools. Look for buttons to change
the look and layout of the page. And experiment with the editing tools. When
you are finished you can Publish your page by click on the publish button and
you will see the URL for your site at the bottom. It should be something like
http://yourusername.googlepages.com/home
Try adding a gadget or more pages and then inserting links to them on your
home page. Could it be any easier to publish a website?
Go back to the Teaching with Google Group and look for the discussion thread
about Publishing with Google Tools. Review the postings there and post your
own message describing how useful you found the Google tools you explored in this module. Please include links to your Blog and Page Creator website so we can view them.
Go to the bottom of this page and click on the Reward link for a reward video clip on Google Video for completing this learning activity.