I often joke that Inoreader is my LMS, and I certainly spend way (WAY) more time with Inoreader every day than I do in Canvas, my school's LMS. In this post, I want to describe one of my favorite features for workflow in Inoreader: the Star feature. If you use the Star feature in Gmail or Google Drive, you already know how the Inoreader Star works: it's a simple flag that you can turn on or off for any content item (i.e. any student blog post).
The way I use the Star in Inoreader is to let myself know that I've left a comment on a blog post. That's important for me in two ways:
Star for specific assignments. During the Orientation, I leave a comment on every student's Favorite Places Post and on their Introduction. Those are the only posts of the semester where I leave a comment on every post, and it takes me a while to do that. I finish all the Favorite Places comments during the first week, but it takes me another week or two to finish all the Introduction posts. To keep track of that, I go to the tag for that post and I use the list view, adding the star as I comment one each post:
Star for individual students. Aside from the Favorite Places and Introduction posts, my comments on people's blogs are random; the blogging space is really more for the students to interact with each other (I mostly interact with them through their projects). But I do comment on a few blogs at random each week along with posts the jump out at me for some reason in the stream, and I use the star to mark the blogs I've commented on. That means I can also look at an individual student's blog overall and see how often I've commented:
So, the Star is very useful for me in keeping track of my interaction with the students in their blogs. Next up: the Inoreader Search feature, which I use to help me connect one student to another.
