Thursday is App Day- Flipboard

When I am not in school, one of my favorite ways to use my iPad is to skim through my Flipboard. Flipboard is a free app that feeds news stories into a magazine like format. Without any customization, Flipboard gives snippets of daily news, tech, lifestyle, and photos. While I've dabbled in these areas, I spend most of my time in my own customized Google Reader and Twitter accounts.

Over the past year, I have signed up to follow many blogs. Initially, I would get email notifications of new posts. Now, through Flipboard, I am signed up through an RSS feed (found on the blog sites) and the feeds come straight into my electronic reader. Each post has the first few sentences and sometimes a picture so I can skim through and decide what I want to read. If the article interests me, I can link to the original article, mark it as a favorite, email the link, or place it in a "readability" account for perusing. I find this to be an activity similar to reading a journal or a newspaper without the piles of paper.

I also have my twitter account fed in through Flipboard and I love the format of the twitter feeds. Instead of just giving the 140 characters, the feeds again include the first few sentences or paragraphs of articles that people I follow have tweeted. Like the Google Reader, I can link to the original article and then have the same options as I listed above.

Truly, I can not over-emphasize the amount of professional development I have gotten from using Flipboard. It has won several awards and, in my opinion, deserves every one and more! If you don't already have this app set up on your iPad, you absolutely should install it!