Beyond School

The continuing saga:

If you’ve been reading the last week’s post, you know about the headaches Bloglines’ Image Wall has caused me and other educators who have trained our students in using feed aggregators for research. And you know that I decided to jump ship to Google Reader to avoid future headaches.

Many of you advised that Google Reader was better anyway. I self-taught crash-course in one long laptop session seemed to confirm this. So good: Bye-bye, Bloglines; Hello, Google Reader. No more headaches.

Such was the plan. But as a long-lost friend told me long ago,

The best way to make God laugh is to tell him your plans.

(–her gender and metaphysical assumptions, not mine.)

The Google Reader headache came today and yesterday when I walked students through exporting their Bloglines subscriptions into Google Reader. Done. Easy.

Next step: “Now lets find more feeds in Google Reader. Easy….Say you want to find a feed on colonialism….”

So I enter that keyword, click “find,” and all I get is two pages of feeds on colonialism–and most of those from random “About.com” sites.

Short version: either I’m missing something, or Google Reader’s “find feeds” feature is pathetic.

So really, with endless “pleases” added–if anybody can teach me how to effectively search for feeds on Google Reader with the ease and power offered by Bloglines, I’ll owe you forever.

I think I’m burning out right now–heavy grading cycle–so I’m probably missing something simple. (Like, duh, del.icio.us tag-search subscriptions; but I wanted to introduce those a bit later. I guess now I can’t do that.)

Bah. Pfft. S.O.S. How could GOOGLE, of all things, make a product whose search feature stinks? (Please teach me that I’m missing something.)

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

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