5 Things We Learned at ISTE and How Flipboard Can Help

Educators / July 27, 2015

Scenes from ISTE: QR code curation; student presenters; Marcelle McGhee tests VR.

Thanks to a recommendation from Flipboard community member Sue Waters (of Edublogs), we attended the large edtech conference ISTE for the first time this summer, hosted an intimate dinner with 20 tech coaches and teachers, and learned a ton! Much of those revelations will be obvious to readers of this blog, but for us ISTE forged new connections between the work of educators and our own. Here’s what we learned and how those insights apply to tools and resources already on Flipboard.

1. Flipboard Club members are just as great in person as they are online—use them! We met, for the very first time, in the flesh, Josh Allen and Marcelle McGhee, two educators who are also key members of The Flipboard Club, an unofficial group of passionate evangelists with whom we work closely. Josh and Marcelle are wonderful resources for educators wishing to learn more about Flipboard. Start by following them on Flipboard (click their names for links) and participating in the Flipboard Club’s weekly #FlipboardChat on Twitter every Wednesday night at 7pm. There’s an education-centric topic every month. Follow The Flipboard Club’s #FlipboardChat magazine for more details.
   

   Josh, Marcelle and Mia (l-r)

2. QR codes: scan, then flip! For me, seeing how Marcelle was live curating into her and Josh’s ISTE magazine, right from the convention floor, was a revelation. As we strolled around the poster sessions, Marcelle would scan the booth’s QR code and then flip the resulting Webpage into her Flipboard Magazine using her iOS share sheet. This way, readers of the magazine were getting the very latest from the showroom floor right from Flipboard. So cool! (QR fans: did you know you could also log into your Flipboard this way? You don’t have to remember your password!)
3. Tech coaches play an important role in supporting technology integration. Again, not news for readers of this blog, but for us it was a new audience we hadn’t fully considered before. When we looked more deeply on Flipboard, we found tech specialists already making magazines, so we compiled some of our favorites into one collection. Flip through to familiarize yourself with the tech coaches, consultants and specialists already on Flipboard, and email us at flipedu@flipboard.com if you know of someone who should be added here.
4. Google dominates. So many of Google’s initiatives are intertwined with the edtech community’s. How does Flipboard connect with Google? For one, Flipboard looks great on any Android device. Two, you can effortlessly sign in to Flipboard using your Google+ account. Three, you can read about the Internet giant and its classroom initiatives by searching for “Google” and/or “Google Classroom,” and following the trail of topics and magazines, including Google Forms in the Classroom, Google for the Classroom and Google Classroom.
5. We learned about trends, plus a whole new vocabulary! As non-educators, we quickly got up to speed in the language of this community; concepts like blended learning, flipped classroom, connected learning, learning management systems and more. VR, AR and 3D printing also played heavily on the showroom floor as attendees studied how these new technologies could fit into classrooms. Follow these topics on Flipboard to keep up with the latest developments in these hot areas, then flip articles of use to your community into a Flipboard Magazine.

How was your ISTE experience? Feel free to get in touch and be sure to follow @FlipEDU on Flipboard, our resource for educators. You can also sign up for our monthly email for periodic summaries of what’s happening in the world of Flipboard and education.

 ~MiaQ is reading Coach Jeffery’s Teaching With Technology

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