I believe I speak for everyone by saying I enjoy fresh and exciting news on the daily! Well, This past week in my class we discussed a great way to do so. Paper.li allows us to do exactly that by creating personalized newspapers with topics that interest each of us. The website states, "We believe that people (and not machines) are the ones qualified to curate the content that matters most. We also think that these same people can greatly help their own communities to find their way through this 'massive content world' we live in. We’re here to help!" The site helps millions of users view endless amounts on interesting material and truly sends out a caring message. This saves tons of time surfing the web for articles because you have already selected exactly what you are looking for. This great service also allows you to follow and learn from smart people, without investing all your personal time on Twitter. Below I have listed 5 useful ways to use paper.li
- Keep up when you're away: Unable to check Twitter? log on to paper.li to see what you've missed.
- Learn more about a particular topic: Subscribe to whatever interests you.
- Share a paper.li summary with non-Twitter people: Share the weekly email with your twiterless friends.
- Get the best info from people, even without following them: You can add smart people to a Twitter list, even if you don’t want to follow everything they say.
- Follow a topic or an event by hashtag: Follow interesting hashtags to make searching easier.
Another amazing online tool that makes life a little easier is called If This Then That, or IFTTT for short. IFTTT is a site that allows you to create your own recipes that give you control over your apps. Recipes are the simple connection between products and apps. An example of a recipe would be someone creating a recipe that whenever they are tagged in a photo on Facebook, that photo gets saved to their cloud based archive. Basically, you create a simple instruction through the apps you love, and use daily. I listed below some of the major social media platforms that the app works with, along with the best recipes you can make!
- Vine
- Tumblr
- YouTube
- Pintrest
These recipes can be very useful for whatever you want to complete. They also come in handy if you are known to be a very forgetful person like myself! The article, The best IFTTT recipes for forgetful people shows how by using this recipe maker, maybe you can get back on track and stay alert. Some of the best recipes I had read about are switching to wifi, finding your phone, and most importantly paying your bills on time! So first off, everyone has done it and for some it ends up being too late already, because when you forget to switch to wifi you may already have used up all that precious data. Well now for Android users, with ifttt all you have to do is make a recipe IF you enter your house THEN it connects to home wifi automatically. Next, losing your hone is stressful enough, but worry no more! This recipe allows the distressed phone loser to send an email to there phone in which the phone rings allowing for an easy find. Lastly, paying your bills should always be a main priority, but of course it is natural to forget. This last ifttt recipe allows you to send yourself a text message monthly on a specific day and time to get on that payment. This also works by sending emails as well!
In chapter four of Untangling the Web, the author goes into detail about how social media and education go hand-in-hand. Social media is only expanding, and it is important to integrate it into our learning environment. One social network that has become very popular targeted towards schools is Edmodo. Edmodo is an educational website that takes the idea of a social network platform, and makes it appropriate for the classroom environment. In fact, this was one of the first educational and technology based tools I learned during my junior year of high school. My teacher would always post assignments and videos, and it truly helped us with the difficult course. I also would use a more well known tool in my classrooms, and it was twitter. This allowed the class to stay in touch outside the classroom to share information for whatever topic we were learning the next day. Our teacher would then display our content on the smart board, which made it effortless and gave us more time to discuss our findings.
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