FLIPBOARD: Make Your Own Class Online Magazine in 5 minutes

Being a teacher on holiday from school means that after the first few days of recharging the batteries, time seems to be in plentiful supply, so what does a teacher do?  Well this one makes ample use of his Apple products, and in particular the ipad.  In doing so, I love to check out FLIPBOARD, an astoundingly informative and enjoyable magazine cataloguer.  It was released at the back end of 2011, and it now boasts the latest 2.0 version, which has an excellent new feature that teachers and students can make wonderful use of with only a few clicks.

The first step is to download the free app from the App Store. Once you have it on your iPad or Iphone (of course, if you don't have the Apple-bug, Flipboard is also available for all platforms) you can start setting it up for your website preferences.

This is an image of my Flipboard front page, from this morning.  In the app, the front page is fluid, which means it shows you example articles & images to entice you inside. This is a really quirky effect.

The available websites range from almost any at all that have images and articles as their emphasis.  You can see part of the list in the next image below.

So, my favorite websites that I use Flipboard for are Twitter, Instagram, 500px, BBC World and a few other news channels.  This is the old Flipboard described, but it is 2.0 that I want to share mostly with you.  The team has come up with a function that allows you to make magazines of what you believe are worth sharing under a magazine title you feel happy with and send the links as pages in your magazine.

All you have to do is CLICK ON THE + (PLUS) icon located at the top right of each news story.  The images below are 6 Blogposts from this site to show as an example.  I 'flipboarded' these from Twitter after I had shared them for the benefit of the magazine I shared with my Twitter-Teacher friends' base.  I now have this magazine to share with anyone as we update the blog every week.

Now, having promoted my first magazine above, I reckon we can all make this a truly viable tool for our students and classes of ICT-Supported programs.  This could be used by students uploading pictures relevant to any research activity or assignment the have done; or any tweet that the students have written in 140 characters responses to lessons and or assignments.  What we plan to use it for next week is to have our students do some research on the Holocaust and effects around the world during WW2.  The students are starting The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, so this new digital magazine option in Flipboard will give an engaging and exciting new tool to support their studies.