Clever App

Recently, I spent a few hours customizing an app to consolidate and share a wide range of professional learning content. The resulting tool, Clever App, compiles RSS feeds from many sites into one handy iPhone app.

Creating a custom app has a certain level of cachet, and though it may seem to be a daunting task, the online service AppMakr.com allows anyone familiar with RSS to create a working app. With a little bit of photo-editing, you can customize an app icon; splash page; and banner. Then, you just locate; copy; and paste the RSS feeds you'd like to include.

There are 5 custom feeds I've built into Clever App:

1] Blog: This button provides the most up-to-date access to all posts on The Clever Sheep blog.

2] Podcast: All current episodes of the Teacher 2.0 Podcast will load and play right within the app.

3] PLN News: This button provides access to the most popular stories and hyperlinks shared by members of my Twitter network. In addition, notable stories and blog posts from my feed reader, are tagged 'PLN' to automate their upload to the app.

4] Bookmarks: Each day, I save a wide range of described content to my Delicious account. Each of these bookmarks, are accessible from the fourth tab.

5] SlideDecks: Each of my public slide presentations is accessible from this Slideshare feed.

An RSS app like Clever App can serve many functions. Whether you are a school administrator looking to aggregate district news feeds; a teacher or student creating an e-portfolio; or a lifelong learner looking to consolidate your favourite subscriptions, you can create and distribute a custom app after only a few hours work.

While there are other options for building an app, developers can create an AppMakr account and play around at no risk. You only need to pay if you decide to have the app built and posted to the iTunes app store. Before following through with a build, I'd recommend checking the web for discount codes. In the end, my app ended up costing me just $49.

Coping With Too Much Wisdom

There is so much wisdom floating around the many e-learning spaces that I've adopted, and only so much time in the day. How does one cope?

The tweets, the blog posts, the podcasts, the news... your daily work and family responsibilities. It's impossible to stay on top of it all, but you can keep in touch with what matters most.

Let me put it this way, just in case you're scanning for headlines:

1] Be Realistic: Realize that you can't catch everything 'as it happens'. Let it be OK, to hear about significant developments a day later.

2] Turn Off Notifiers: Check for content on your schedule. The email, tweets and blog posts will all be there... when the time is right for you to deal with them. Don't let incoming content dictate your schedule.

3] Be Selective: Let your RSS Reader become a portfolio filled with only the richest content. With the right feeds, getting your reader down to 'zero' won't bring relief, but will leave you anxious for more.

4] Take the Time: Ensure that reading/listening a part of your daily routine, rather than an 'always on' torrent of information. Learning with a cup of tea, reminds me that reading is an experience to savor.

5] Remember Why You're Here: Learning isn't a race, it should be a pleasurable experience. If you're racing to keep up with feeds or tweets, maybe it's time to thin your subscriptions.

6] Dig Deep: In our desire to digest more and more, we often let tweets trump richer, deeper, more thoughtful writing. And when we find that elusively rich article or book, we tend to speed read or scan only for the highlights. Do you remember when reading was a pleasurable experience? It still can be.

7] Unplug: Even though Starbucks and McDonalds may offer free wifi, there are other ways to engage with ideas. What real books are you reading? What face-to-face conversations are you having?

8] Remember What Matters Most: Your family, your colleagues, your work, your play... they all matter, and they are each deserving of your time and attention. Connecting with global colleagues is great, but don't do it at the expense of your flesh and blood relationships.

These are but a few things I try to remind myself. Care to add your advice?

Photo Credits: Jah~; Kristen C.

Tag Yourself as 'TwitterTeacher'

One of the things we've been trying to get our heads around on Twitter for Teachers, is how educators can find others with similar portfolios. In discussion with Ed Webb on a feed called "Do we want to list 'Teachers on Twitter'?" we happened upon a unique solution that engages teachers in 'tagging themselves'.

Our strategy leverages Twitter, Delicious, and Google Reader (or any other RSS reader). If you know these tools, the explanation below may well set you on your way towards subscribing to a wide variety of TwitterTeachers!

Click to play or visit the large version.

Teaching Them to Teach Themselves

By now most people are very familiar with the way that metadata tags are "Teaching the Machine". What is less commonly understood, is how tags can be leveraged to engage students in "Teaching Themselves".


Assuming that a teacher can create a unique identifier for a class or course (i.e., Lucier_physics_2008 or LucierSPH08-unit5), there are many ways to engage your students in the gathering of teaching and learning resources.

1] Invite students to post and tag Flickr images that match with concepts taught in class. Students might also add comments to existing photos.

2] Encourage students to share bookmarks on Delicious, Diigo or Furl. Link to videos, blog posts, photos, songs...

3] Promote the use of reflective journals in the form of blog entries that use the course identifier as a keyword or tag.

4] Add comments to blog posts that include your course identifier. While linking to rich thinking, you can model how learners might participate in educational dialogue within the blogosphere.

5] Demonstrate how comments can be added to YouTube or TeacherTube videos. "This video would be great for my LucierSPH08 course!"

6] Set up a Custom Search Engine to search specific sites for course-matching content. Tag the best of the best with your course/class code.

7] Add custom sections to a personalized news page. Consider simplifying the process by sending the RSS feed to Google Reader or another aggregator.

8] Demonstrate how to search blog entries for topical materials. Send custom searches to your feed aggregator for filtering.

9] Tag selected educational and current events podcasts. Many post-secondary institutions like Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, Penn State, Texas A&M, Duke, Queens, MIT offer access to lectures and other content. Consider subscribing to a few of the many terrific free podcasts available on iTunes. Shameless plug: Have you heard the Teacher 2.0 Podcast?

10] The advanced step: Set up live feeds to various content sources by aggregating tagged content to a community location by using a tool like PageFlakes or iGoogle.

Before launching such a social learning project with students, be sure to demonstrate the power of resource sharing by pre-tagging numerous resources specific to your course. A live demo using your course keyword should go a ways towards whetting the appetite of your students.

Who knows, by opening this conversation about sharing, you might even learn a few search tricks from your students! The video below by Jimmy Ruska, demonstrates what some students already know about effective searches for complimentary material, be it for music or university textbook content.




Photo Credit: Maureen Flynn-Burhoe

RSS: Get inside the wrapper!

If RSS is 'Really Simple Syndication" why do so few people really understand it?

If you are reading this blog because you have subscribed to an appropriate feed, then you likely won't get anything out of this post. If, on the other hand, you came across this post randomly, then you might consider taking advantage of RSS to provide yourself with 'one-stop' reading.

The best analogy that I can come up with for Really Simple Syndication, is the chocolate bar. You might be attracted to the wonderful packaging, but really, what you want, is the candy that exists inside the wrapper!

Really Simple Syndication ensures that the CONTENT can be subscribed to, while the FORM is inconsequential. In the 'old days' of 5 or 10 or more years ago, web authors used to spend lots of time customizing the form of their content. Fonts, sizes, colours, and other attributes that adapted and augmented the content ('the wrappings') if you like, are becoming secondary to the content. RSS, allows the reader to focus solely on the content. You might want to view "RSS in Plain English".

A quick and entertaining explanation of RSS is included within The Machine is Us/ing Us:



In order to access the content, you need to select and get comfortable with a 'feed-reader'. These 'aggregators' are free and widely available. I prefer Google Reader because it has the same look and feel as my G-mail account, but there are many options available.

Once you have a feed-reader, you can subscribe to all kinds of syndicated content. Just look for the orange RSS symbol in any URL, and you can copy the entire URL from your address bar, to add a subscription to your feed-reader:



Now you can subscribe to all types of content, including:

Your friends Flickr images
A colleagues bookmarks: http://del.icio.us/thecleversheep
Your favourite newspapers: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Any of a number of Blogs... like this one: http://feeds.feedburner.com/thecleversheep
or Podcasts: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ E-learningDaily

I didn't mention this in today's Teacher 2.0 Podcast, but this is just the beginning of huge changes in the way we access information! As coders are coming to realize, you can also draw RSS information into other sites and programs, resulting in a wave of new 'mash-ups' that are turning the world wide web on its ear. What are you waiting for? After all, it is "REALLY SIMPLE SYNDICATION"!