Sunday 20 November 2011

Paper.li: best use practices

Twitter provides a wealth of education related content and while I like to read and scan this content through the Flipboard app on my iPad, Paper.li comes to the rescue when I simply do not have time each day to keep up with new posts.


Paper.li collates tweets and RSS feeds specified by the user, then publishes them in a newspaper format. There are front page headlines, sections promising more, and referrals to individual hashtags. This can be published either once daily, or morning and evening, or weekly. The user logs in with their Twitter ID and chooses sections for the paper and publication details. This can be set to be tweeted to followers at regular intervals.

Why is this useful and what is the best way to read all these compilations? 
Paper.li collects the tweets I've not had time to see and by setting it to publish at a time of evening when I know I'll have reading time, it provides a great summary of what I have missed during the last 24 hours. I like the way it puts all the media items together so that one can quickly see which are presentations, videos and images. This is particularly useful for finding and viewing those clips and interactives that do not display on the ipad, when I'm back at the computer.
 
This is the standard display. Instead of the limited 140 characters of Twitter one is now able to see the first paragraph of articles that have been tweeted.



A  more useful display option is the See all articles which then provides options for sorting by source, topic or news spotter. This allows the reader greater control and provides information about the source of articles. Displayed in this manner it is now easier to skip down the page and choose articles for further reading.



The Archives button from the standard display allows me to go back and find earlier material, all those tweets from my PLN are not lost! By the way, paper.li it has a useful widget to embed on your blog, seen here in the right hand column.
Each day I look at paper.li publications by several folks in my PLN. Three favourites are , Library Grits daily, Professional learning news and The Tania Sheko Daily I get to to see articles I would not otherwise encounter.

Paper.li works well for me so if you have not yet investigated it, here's a concise tutorial to get you started. What strategies do you use to keep up with the relentless twitter feed?

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