Curate and Showcase Student Learning With Flipboard

A few my colleagues, I wish there were more, are interested in getting their students blogging on a consistent basis. The arguments for student blogging are numerous and well-documented with one of the most persuasive points being that students tend to write more frequently, thoughtfully, and thoroughly for authentic audiences. These same colleagues were looking for a work flow solution to collect, review, and share their students' blogs. Flipboard to the rescue!

A short while back, I published a post highlighting the reasons why Flipboard was quickly becoming my "do-it-all" app for the iPad. Flipboard is a 1:1 teacher's best friend, or at least one of their best friends. So, Charlie, Sean, Gary, and Jen, this one's for all of you! This post explains how to collect and share student blogs using Flipboard. Kudos to Sue Waters, Richard Byrne, and Joe O'Brien for blazing the trail on this strategy.

Make sure that you have the Chrome web browser installed on your computer. **The Chrome iOS app will not allow you to complete the work flow set-up. However, once your Flipboard magazines have been set up, any mobile device, in our case iPads, become excellent tools for reviewing and sharing class magazines.
Decide upon a blogging platform for your students. Since we are becoming a GAFE district, Blogger makes sense. Other notable options include WordPress and Edublogs.
Create a free Flipboard account.
Create a new magazine to collect your students' work. For example, "S439 Innovators".
Install the "Flip-it" extension for Chrome. This will place the familiar looking, red, Flipboard icon on your browser tool bar. This button will allow a single-click share of the web content that is open in your browser. Not only will it share to Flipboard, but you will be given a choice of where to post the content, either in an existing magazine, or one being newly created.

Once the collection of student blogs has started, Flipboard magazines can be shared out in email messages, text messages, as social media posts, or as hyper-linked content.
Magazines can also be created based upon Twitter lists, favorites, hashtags, Google+ circles, and a variety of other curation methods.
Contributors can be invited to magazines. For example, teams of students can be formed with the purpose of curating and collecting research information into a group magazine that in turn, can be shared with the class, with parents, or beyond.
Notifications can be set up on your mobile device alerting you, or your students, when new content has been posted to the class magazine.

Now that you have seen this work flow option, and the classroom potential of Flipboard, what do you think? How do you envision Flipboard propelling your students' learning?

** (Nov. 2014) NEW for iOS users, web content can be flipped directly into your existing, or new, Flipboard e-zines using the "share to" button in the Safari browser.

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Unknown said…

Whole blog is very informative and all the things in blog are described very clearly,thanks for posting.
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November 30, 2013 at 1:22 AM

Robert T. Schuetz said…

Hello John, thank you for taking time to read and comment. I am glad to be sharing information that you find valuable. I am always looking for ideas for the next post. Do you have any suggestions for topics? Thanks again John, talk soon, Bob

December 5, 2013 at 8:26 PM

Nocking the Arrow

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