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Hello everyone. I'm Mike from Boise State University's EdTech Program and I'm here to
bring you this tutorial on how to use FEEDLY. You can access it by going to this website
at www.cloud.feedly.com.
Now, what is Feedly? Feedly is basically a news aggregator tool that allows a user with
an account to subscribe to RSS feeds from different websites and access the content
in one place. The key to the whole things is RSS feeds.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with RSS feeds, I'll just explain it really quickly.
So RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Now what does that mean. Well, websites want
people to read their content, that's why they exist. So, to get more people to do this,
they syndicate their content - or make it available for other websites to access. In
order to do this successfully, it needs to be Really Simple, So RSS allows websites to
easily makes its content available to others.
The basic idea is really nice. I have a lot of websites that I go onto everyday. But every
time I want to access them, I have to go to each site individually which can be a pain,
because I have to go on all of them, I might not have enough time, plus if they don't have
any new content I waste my time. The beauty of RSS feeds however brings the content to
me in one single page.
So, how do we use Feedly... lets begin....
Here I am on my web browser. I'm going to go to the website www.cloud.weebly.com. For
those of you who don't have an account, you can get started here. I do have an account,
so I'm going to click on "login". I'll type in my email address associated with the account.
Ok, so here I am this is my Feedly account. Here are all the new feeds for today. They
are broken down into categories. I can search articles, I can refresh. Now to add content,
there are three ways to do it that are easy, medium, and hard. Lets start with easy. Come
over here to where it says add content and down here there are these different categories.
Basically, you click on a category and see the popular feeds in each category.
So I'm going to click on Cooking and I see what we have. I see Food Network Blog, well
I like food so I'm going to subscribe to that feed. So I come over to the plus sign here
and click it. Now here's my add a new source menu. I have title and categories. I'm going
to create a new category and type food. That's it. I have a title, I have a category, so
I'm going to come down here and click Add. And now it is added.
If I come back to My Feedly, I can see all my feeds here. I can come down to Food and
see Food Network and all the delicious food to get ideas for recopies.
Another way to add content which is a little more complicated is to... well actually its
not complicated at all... is to search. I'm going to come here and search for National
Geographic. Here I have all the different feeds for National Geographic. I'm going to
add one, go back to My Feedly, I'll click on National Geographic, and here I am with
all the news. I can click on one and read it, share it on Social Media sites, and all
that.
Now, for some that is a little more complicated. Lets say I wanted to add one from my university,
Boise State. Well I don't see anything here from Boise State, so I can go to the site
to see if we even have anything. I know we do, so I'm going to come here and click Campus
News, and down here near Events I see a little RSS Feed icon. Its going to take me to the
Feed Page. I'll copy the URL and paste it into the Search and now I see a feed for Events.
I'll add the content, add a category of Education, and click Add. So it's a little more complicated
but still pretty easy.
Now if I come back to My Feedly I can go to today and see all the new content. I can view
it by content, by category, I can save some for later. Anyway, it is a really easy way to bring content to you which is
especially nice today since there are so many websites.
So, just as a quick recap, Feedly allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds by either searching
for the feed here in the search box or by pasting the RSS URL here. Then just clicking
the Plus sign and see all your feeds here in the page and organize it by category.
Now, for either a business or a classroom, feeds are nice because they allow you to see
all sorts of similar content in one place. For example here I have my EDTECH program
feeds - I'll add another one, Edutopia. I've spent the time talking about Feedly, but with
RSS feeds in general you can download a widget for Feeds and see feeds on your class website.
If I wanted to create a classroom site for myself, I can bring in these different feeds
right to my website. If you run a search you can find different Feed Widgets, and see you just add the Feed URL and can see everything
in this box right on my website. Its really nice, it's a nice tool to have and organize
your content.
So I hope this has been a nice informative tutorial and I hope you learned how to use
Feedly.