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/

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