For our 4th/5th tasks in our 23 Things class we were tasked with signing up for Feedly and develop an RSS reading habit. I had a good deal of skepticism about this task. I consider myself well informed and I rely a good deal on twitter both for news and for shared resources and ideas from my PLN (see my previous posts on twitter here and here).  As I have said before I love twitter and I find it a near perfect professional and personal resource, so I really have not seen the need to add even more to my daily diet of articles, updates, and resources. Nevertheless, I signed up for Feedly, added the app to my iphone, and began the process.

I also began the process of asking my PLN on twitter and my cousins who were devotees of google reader why I needed an RSS feed. From my PLN I heard that mainly that they used rss feeds to keep up with their favorite websites and blogs, and from my cousins I heard their recommendations for following different sites and why they loved google reader. Still I wasn’t really convinced. I did turn to my feedly page daily and I found articles of interest, but frankly I didn’t find it more useful than twitter at least for me.

Then  on the recommendation of my cousin I tried out flipboard,and I became a believer. Although Feedly certainly offers similar  tools and the ability to follow great resources, what I like about Flipboard is the ability to create my own magazines from the articles that come up in my feed. The layout is better and especially on the webtool more visually interesting. I can also add my twitter feed to my flipboard and can easily save the articles and resources I find useful to an unlimited number of my own magazines. Since I mainly rely on my iphone to view my twitter feed, I have found it a bit clunky to save my favorites either to instapaper or diigo and then to Evernote.  With Flipboard, I can save them directly to a magazine to read later or share and that has saved me time and steps which I definitely appreciate.

I quickly found myself addicted to using this tool, and I can now say that I see the value of rss feeds although I still think twitter is a more important tool for me because it has the added advantage of helping me connect with other educators, but I am now likely to use flipboard as my conduit for following my twitter feed and tweetdeck for following and participating in twitterchats.  Here are a few magazines I’ve made already on race and gender and another one where I am saving articles that might be of use in our American Studies class.  I’ll post more as I gather them, but for now I can definitely recommend adding an RSS feed to your daily digital diet and checking out flipboard.