The nice thing about Flipboard is that the people you follow in your network of teachers et al are can now be followed on Flipboard. Many of these people make smaller curated magazines and some with original content of their own. This content can be drawn from all over: other social areas like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook etc and individual URLs.
It's this custom URL addition that makes it really handy for a teacher to build their own magazines for any topic they desire. Flipboard has its own online editor at editor.flipboard.com where you sign into a 'dashboard' of sorts and rearrange tiles on the page. The tiles being the pages of your content.
The real beauty of this is that you can do this live while the students are in front of you. It's a bit like Nearpod except the presentation is a bit more organic that Nearpod's ultra linear feel. The tiles you can see below are in lesson format. The '1' you see is the introduction to Ancient China topic and the inventions the Chinese founded many moons ago. These lesson pieces can be swapped out to suit the classes or the students you are aiming it at. You could divide this up into different magazines for groups or even as a research exercise prior to the topic.
Read MoreCloning iPads or iPod touches isn't illegal. This note from Apple iTunes Support tells you that you can sync 10 devices to one account per authorised computer. If you read here you can see that iBooks is somewhat different. As too iCloud. If you have a home account for the iOS devices in your home then you obviously sync to that account. Your child, brother, sister, aunt, dog, cat, husband or wife all do the same. This amounts to a lot of copying of data and contacts (Can you see how useful that is for school? Not so handy for family though. I'm not sure your 14 year old child would want his/her contacts syncing to your iOS device!) to many devices on the same account. Is there a limit? Well, yes and no. I point this out below too. The limit we find is about 20 restores. Then it becomes a little sticky and we have to use more than one Mac to finish completely. Hence, below you see we use 5. I am not using Windows PCs with iTunes as you can't sync multiple devices at once with iTunes on Windows. See below from the Apple discussions board.
Read MoreQR Codes, I have to say, are a marvellous method for discovery in school. Why? Because they offer up the 'unknown' to children and techers alike. The children, as you can see to the left, don't know what is behind the code until the image appears, like magic, before them. The game we played ensures good language and teamwork as they try to work out which image matches the code. Some children didn't know what the Olympics were and none of them had ver heard of Greco Roman wrestling or water polo - "What? They play handball in the water?" Well, yes, they sort of do.
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