Educators Send Flipboard Magazines Into the Classroom

Recently we’ve noticed a number of blog posts that describe how teachers are creating Flipboard magazines to collect and share content with students and other education professionals. The most recent of these comes from Josh Allen, who writes on the Tech Fridge blog about using Flipboard magazines to support his program to integrate technology in the classroom:

I set up a Flipboard magazine for myself to read based off the #blendedlearning hashtag on Twitter, but I wanted a way to save and share the great articles I was reading. I had heard about creating your own magazines in Flipboard, but hadn’t ever tried one. They are very simple to create and easy to add to from any device, not just the app! […]

Recently I accepted a new position in a district that uses Google Apps for Education (GAFE), something my previous district hadn’t used. So I set up another magazine! But this time I knew I needed some help with curating good articles. When you create your magazines, you are also allowed to add “contributors” to help you curate. I had added my friend Kristina to my blended learning magazine because of some work she’s doing at our state department of education. This time, I decided to add a larger number of people who were already familiar with GAFE (Stacy, Mickie, and Jim), knowing they would have different perspectives and information streams that I might not be familiar with.

Another example that caught our eye was this item from Jeff Utecht’s Thinking Stick blog, which suggests using Flipboard as a textbook replacement:

Basically a teacher would have a Flipboard account… set up a magazine for their class and then “flip” all the articles, resources, etc they want students to access into the magazine. The students subscribe to the magazine and have all that content dispalyed beautifully on their screen… no matter what that screen is.

Class as Content Curators:
Of course….that would work but I think we can go farther. I don’t want the teacher finding all the content for the course. I want students to have the ability to add content to their “textbook” as well. Content that we can discuss in the classroom, that can spark conversation…the real reason we come together..to be social. What if we could have all the students in a class adding to the “textbook” have them find things that interest them on a given topic and allow them to “flip” that into our “textbook” as well. Flipboard allows that too… where you can invite others to add to your Flipboard magazine. Game changer!!!!

But Wait There’s More!
Because ever student is going to need a Flipboard account to make this work they also will be able to create their own boards around content they enjoy. The class magazine (aka textbook) becomes part of that but so does other things that interest them. Also…..because you can search a twitter hashtag and add that to your Flipboard. A class hashtag now becomes part of the conversation. Where kids can tweet something, hashtag it with something like #engp1ju (English Period 1 Jeff Utecht) and have all that content in their new “textbook” as well.

We always love to hear about the clever ways people use Flipboard magazines, either in education or other fields. If you’ve come up with a creative application for Flipboard magazines, tell us about it!