Organise content with Flipboard

More than a social magazine

Flipboard is described as a social magazine designed to bring content to iPhones , iPod Touches and iPads. If you go to the link you will find there is a blog where they keep you fully informed and up to date. It’s another free app which has so much classroom potential. I downloaded it and again I was excited with how it was operating and what it could do. It organises content into categories for you to choose or you can use the search box and add your own content as you wish. It runs in a very similar way to the interface of the i-gadgets but you customise it to your own needs. It follows the same principle as the iPad for organising content. If you wish to shift or delete something you hold your finger on the picture until they all wiggle and have a black cross in the top left of the picture. If you press the black cross you will delete that picture and associated content. If you want to move the picture – hold your finger on the picture and slide it to where you want on the screen. you can even slide it to the next screen if you have lots of categories as I do. Flipboard is now my one stop shop for news, information, social media. I don’t have to keep going to other apps, icons, bookmarks, webpages, logins. It is wonderfully well thought out and easy! In a classroom we have an issue with borrowed iPads in that they are tethered 5 at a time to an email address to download paid apps. So whose job is this? We are gradually working it out. Some schools get students to purchase the iPad and download the content themselves to help with this awkward procedure. It is a good deal to get paid apps onto 5 iPads but if you have 30 students that is 6 email addresses and 6 lots of updating. We’ll work it out. Just a bit of an implementation dip. In the meantime I was thinking Flipboard would actually be a very good way of mustering content and sites suitable for classroom use and it would be easy to get the students to do that on the borrowed iPads. In that sense Flipboard would be a powerful tool for education because as a teacher or student you can organise your Flipboard to cater efficiently to your teaching and learning needs. Much more than a social magazine.