Trends in the Profession - iPad as a Professional Development Tool

I’m super excited for everyone to get their iPads.  I have one, and now I’m ready to learn fromall of you as well!  It’s such a greattool for personal productivity, service to our students and faculty, and generally beingcreative. I'm sure I haven't discovered all of iPad's secrets, so it will be great to learn from you all.

It’s going to be important to really USE this tool ininnovative and creative ways, which is why I want to make sure we are sharingwhat we discover.  We can discuss aplatform for sharing at our upcoming teambuilding event.  I’m planning a series of blog posts thatdescribe fabulous apps that help me daily.

One of my favorite ways to use mine is to keep up onprofessional reading.  I currently useGoogle Reader as my feed, and I subscribe to 60+ blogs and newsletters relatedto librarianship, technology, and instruction. When viewing it in Google itself, it’s sort-of a nightmare; up in therighthand corner is the number of articles sitting there waiting for me:  1000+.  Yeah, it decided to stop counting afterone thousand.

This laundry list of articles to sift through is daunting to me, and makes me want to avoid my feed reader altogether!  Wouldn’t it be nice if you could flip through your articles magazine-style at your leisure?  Turns out that you can with Flipboard.

Flipboard is my favorite thing in life right now.  It pulls in your feeds from all your sources including Twitter and Facebook, as well as lets you choose Flipboard “picks” by topic, and presents them to you in a magazine layout style.  It’s much more enjoyable to read this way!  You can click on headlines to show the full article, and then save as a favorite, or share it via Twitter, Facebook, or email.   Check out this video for a visual:

Meet Flipboard. http://youtu.be/v2vpvEDS00o

Flipboard will keep you in touch with the professionalworld, in style.  (There’s my cheesytagline for ya.)

So now you are thinking, “Awesome!  Flipboard will change my life. Jen, what canI do RIGHT NOW to prepare for Flipboard?” So glad you asked!

Do you have a feed reader? If not, I recommend Google Reader – it’s easy to use.  Look for feeds that support your interests,and you may find some that are specific to your subject (Business folks:  Check out Bizologie).  Some of my favorite newsletters and blogsinclude the following:

EducationalTechnology and Mobile Learning

Stephen’s Lighthouse

Free Technology forTeachers

SearchReSearch

The ‘M’ Word –Marketing Libraries

iPad Insight

Leadership Freak

On My Mind (Thisblog J)

Once you have your reader populated with a few of your favorite things, you're ready to integrate it with Flipboard when you get your iPad.  What are some of your favorites?  Comment below. 

And by the way... if you want to learn more about how RSS works, as well as other great productivity apps like Evernote and social bookmarking with Diigo, check out the Fall rollout of the 23 Things for Faculty Development program - details will be coming out in the next couple of weeks.