Content Discovery: Manage Your Daily Information Stream


Previously on When EdTech Meets ELT:
I wrote about how to curate your own collection or articles using Flipboard, resulting in a beautiful digital magazine.

In this "episode," I’ll write about how to discover content and follow blogs and websites in order to create your own daily information stream. This is going to become your own, personalized information diet.

I was planning to write about Feedly alone, but on February 10, 2015, Flipboard launched its new web service and it’s definitely worth mentioning.

Feedly is probably the most popular online news reader and where the majority of the Google Reader users fled to, after Google shut it down in February 2013. Feedly allows you to subscribe to blogs and websites that provide an RSS feed. This practically means more time for you since you get every new article and blog post in one place - your Feedly page -  without having to check each blog or website individually for new content.

To begin, you only need to log in with you Google, Facebook, Twitter, Windows or Evernote account. Yes, there are apps both for iOS and Android and everything syncs perfectly across your computer and mobile devices. Feedly is a must to keep all your news and other content sources organized.


Feedly has a nice discovery tool as well. Just type in your interests and you’ll get a list of related topics or individual websites to subscribe to.

feedly03.png


Every time there is a new post, it will appear on your subscription list. You can also group subscriptions into collections, e.g. education, sports or cooking. Although the basic service is free, there are some premium features that come with the Pro version that include being able to search through all your subscriptions. You might find this extremely useful if you’re doing research.

You’ve probably known Flipboard from the mobile apps. But now you can get it on the web too. And it’s beautiful. Just go to flipboard.com and you’ll see what I mean. Just sign in and you can read the latest articles that are waiting for you in your account. If you are a new user, you can start by following topics (curated by the Flipboard team), sources (individual blogs and websites) or other people’s magazines.

Flipboard topics.png

This article is focused mostly on information sources without taking the social aspect into consideration. There are other tools that use your social media connections to surface interesting content, but we’ll leave those for another time.

This post is part of the When EdTech Meets ELT series, my regular column for the TESOL Macedonia Thrace Northern Greece e-bulletin, and was originally published in March 2015.

Image via https://www.flickr.com/photos/37171504@N00/5037340040/Author: Jeramey Jannene https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can you hear that? Practice speaking and listening using free tools

Image
Listen. How often do you listen? Especially to your own voice? For those learning a foreign language, speaking is a core skill and technology has made it really easy to practice speaking and listening back to our own voice. ESL learners are lucky, since most of the apps available today were made for English. It is, after all,  the language used in over 55% of the Internet. Practice speaking and listen to your voice It is very important for language learners to be able to listen to their own voice, since it helps them improve their pronunciation and intonation, both extremely important in verbal communication. There are many ways they can record their voice, play it back and share the recording with their teacher, relatives and friends. You could also do the same and share your voice comments with them. Using a mobile device iOS devices come equipped with the Voice Memo app, which allows easy recording and sharing via email or other apps, such as Dropbox. Ther...
More »

All you need is Chrome

Image
This post is as a sneak peek of the presentation I did at the 23rd TESOL Macedonia Thrace Northern Greece International Annual Convention, on March 26, 2016 and was originally published on the TESOLMTh e-bulletin. Computers have made it a lot easier to organize our work, do research and enhance teaching by incorporating creativity tools. The web has added flexibility and collaboration to the mix. Chrome is a web browser that brings everything together: Research, Collaboration, Productivity and Creativity. All this is achieved by both using the browser’s features and by adding third-party apps. Not like those on our smartphones, but web apps that bring additional features and functionality. Everything syncs like magic Got a new computer? Good for you! Been using Chrome? Once you log into Chrome on your shiny new laptop using your Google account, something wonderful happens. Have you witnessed it? All your preferences, your bookmarks, your saved forms and passwo...
More »

Binge on learning English with Netflix

Image
Growing up in Greece in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, with no Internet and very limited TV channels, especially when it came to foreign satellite networks, it was almost impossible to have an immersive English content experience and practice listening properly. By immersive, I mean no localization whatsoever. English content was available on TV, but it was subtitled in Greek. Thankfully, dubbing was a failure, so we stuck with the European countries that subtitled foreign films and TV shows instead. I still remember sticking pieces of paper at the bottom of the screen as a last resort, after failing to avoid reading the Greek subtitles. The bright white letters kept magnetizing my gaze. Therefore, practicing listening to English was possible, but only partially. Watching a programme without translated subtitles or with English subtitles (for the hearing impaired) was a much harder task. You would either have to buy a satellite dish and receiver (quite expensive back then) or, if you ...
More »