Zite: A Magazine Created Especially Just For You

If you're a reflective practitioner like me, you are constantly searching for articles to read about the newest trends in education and ways that you can enhance your teaching methods.  This includes subjects such as pedagogy, professional development,  teaching, educational technology, special education, and much more. We all know that teaching is dynamic and not static.  The students we are teaching nowadays are not the same students that were in our classrooms 20 years ago.  Therefore, we need to change our teaching styles in order to personalize the learning towards our students.  Because my time is so limited, it is difficult for me to research various magazines on different articles.  And then I discovered Zite.

Zite is an awesome mobile app for educators. It's a free app that allows you to create a personalized magazine for a specific topic. Tell it what you’re interested in and the app will suck in relevant blog posts, news articles, videos, and articles. Over time, Zite learns about your preferences and serves up more of the content you want. This app is ideal for teachers who want to stay on top of a subject and find the latest news to share with students without having to spend hours scouring the Web.  Zite attempts to customize and deliver the type of articles you like to read in a newspaper style reading.It is Wifi- connection enabled which means that you can easily access news content with a tap of a button.

As educators, we can try Zite to make our reading experience even better. You can access the content of your favorite websites and even customize it in a newspaper style and share it with others. Invite your students to use it and enjoy the look they would have when reading the feeds of the websites they like. I am quite sure you will like this app when you try it.  The more you use Zite, the better the app will get to know you and select articles that are based on your personal interests.  Your magazine will be personalized just for you.  That's personalized learning at its best.  

Here is a list of some of the main features that Zite offers to its users:

• It is compatible with iPad and requires iOS 3.2 or later.
• It is free
• It is easy to use
• It has an intuitive interface
• It allows its users to customize and use magazine style to read their feds
• It has 1000's of magazine sections to choose from using a smart auto-suggest tool
• It allows you to share content you like to Twitter, Facebook and via e-mail.

To get started using Zite, here is a short video tutorial to help you understand how to use Zite on your iPad.