http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/07/building-community-for-youth-vo
I want to build on our first attempts to have students use Google Reader to do research for their blog posts. Last semester, Susan Ettenheim and Chris Sloan joined me by having our students use Google Reader in our classroom as part of a more general blogging project connected to Youth Voices. We found that students' posts were often more compelling when they "introduced, inserted, and interpreted" quotations from other sources, especially blogs and news sources that their students found by searching Google Blog Search and Google News. I also had students quote from podcasts, albeit ones that he had selected for them and with no particular topic or question in mind.

Here are some examples from last semester of Youth Voices bloggers using published voices from blogs and news items in their own blog posts:

• My students at East Side Community High School, NYC: Jennifer, Felix, John (podcast listener)
• Susan's students at Eleanor Roosevelt High School, NYC: Robyn, Mercedes, Christina
• Chris's students at Judge Memorial High School, Salt Lake City, Utah: Ameera, Eric's China post, Emerson's myspace

I think there are two main habits and several understandings that we are want students to develop by learning to use Google Reader.

1. Students will use Google Reader to collect and read online sources about self-directed inquiries.
2. Students will include voices from the sources they collect in Google Reader when they post on their blogs.

Understandings:

• Students will begin to use common "texts" with students in their niche group of friends or "elgg communities" using the Google Reader Share function.
• Students will assess their own reading habits, using the Google Reader Trends function.
• Students will understand the differences between blogs, news sources, articles, peer-reviewed journals, videos, and podcasts.
• Students will distinguish between the RSS-resources (listed above) from web sites, Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias and information sources.

See more of my thinking about this at this wiki page: Using Google Reader.