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Easy student reading lists with Google+ and Feedly



I have been reading quite a few relevant blogs and feeds for my senior PE classes, at the moment we are working on 2.2 - Train to Gain and I kept on coming across great fitness resources that I knew the boys would be interested in, as well as tips that would help them plan training sessions.  I have been
using Google reader to collect information and resources for a couple of years now (have a look at this post) and enjoyed the simplicity of feedly for catching up on reading with an ipad, phone or laptop.  I wanted to share the information on a platform that all the boys could use as well as have access to from home.  Twitter is one of the easiest ways to do this but not all of the boys have a smartphone - let alone a twitter account.

Last week I started experimenting with google+ and decided that this would be the best way to share the information as a group - creating a small social/sharing network for each class, and posting resources and comments to 'the wall' or feed.  After merging my gmail account google+ and my google apps + account I was ready to go - this is another story and leads to a bit of confusion, but not applicable for everyone, so don't worry - you can get straight into it without merging accounts!



Google+ seems the obvious answer because you can create circles - which allows you to share certain things with different groups, so I would simply read something relevant - hit the g+ button in feedly and then choose who I wanted to receive the link - you can also send a comment and email notification at the same time.  This is how you set it up.....

Prerequisite - you need to enable your google+ account and set up your classes as circles, see how to do this in this post...





 1) Go to feedly and follow the instructions to sign up and create an account - it will probably make you install an icon in your web browser but that is ok!  Link it with your google account by following the prompts!




2) Once you are in you will probably be looking at a relatively blank feed if you haven't used it before - so start subscribing to sources, use the 'add content' button in the left hand column and a window will come up allowing you browse, search or add url.



3) Once you have built up some good sources you have several sharing options (facebook, twitter, buffer and LinkedIn) - but we are concentrating on g+1, as this will specifically target our circle/ class we created in google+.  Go on - click the button and the 'share' box will come up!





4) Choose who you want to share this with, as you can see above - I think this resource is useful for my 12 PEC class to read, it will also share to my public stream, if I only wanted to share it with the class I would click on the 'x' near the green 'public' box, this link would then only show on the 12 PEC screen.  I can also send them an email to remind them that they have to read the resource!!



5) After you press share you will go back to feedly to read more interesting things, if you are worried that it was all too easy and that there is no way that the link magically appeared for all of your class to see then you can easily check by going to your google+ page (click the +'yourname' at the top of the gmail screen) then find the class by going to More at the top of the feed.  This will show you all that the students can see, and any comments - you could ask them all to comment on something to let you know they have read them - or get them to fill in a 'form' with what they thought of the article?!



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