Getting students to make connections with content and
current events can be a struggle. Sometimes one wishes to categorize news
articles by themes. You may want your students to curate news articles or
Tweets with news articles or political cartoons by topic or unit of study. Flipboard
allows you to do all of this and more.
I first came to experiment with Flipboard for classroom use
after struggling with my students to watch or read the news and connect it to
units of study. After thinking of how I was going to support my students, I
remembered the magazine feature of Flipboard. I have had positive feedback from
this and even have some of my Academy students, think homeroom, reading up on
current events on their smart phones.
Flipboard is a fantastic app for viewing and creating news
magazines. You will need to sign up and create your account on a smartphone of
tablet after you download the app. Once you do this you can create your own
magazines and add articles from Flipboard or search for items on Twitter.
Additionally, you can embed an individual magazine onto your
class website using their HTML Magazine Widget. To do this, you will first need
to go to the Flipboard Editor web page. Select the Magazine Widget. You will
need to paste in the public URL for the magazine that you wish to embed.
Next
select the button to the right of the text box and the HTML embed code will
appear in a box below.
Copy this code and enter into your embed code box if you
are using Weebly or follow the embed/HTML protocol of the website maker you are
using. Now, your magazine will be integrated into your website page.
Another feature that Flipboard offers if you are 1:1 with
ipads is that you can share the magazine and students can comment on the
articles while they are in the app…like a discussion board.
Additionally, you could have your students create their own
Flipboard magazines. When they curate and add an article, you could require
them to comment their reaction or connection to a topic of study as well. You
would need to have them share their Flipboard magazine with you- this can be
done easily with a Google Form.
There are so many wonderful possibilities of ways to
integrate Flipboard into your history classroom…get thinking.