How Do I Read?

I admit openly that the iPhone has changed my life.  According to a study published by The Guardian magazine in the United Kingdom;

• 47% of British teenagers and 27% of adults own a smartphone

• Sixty per cent of adults and 37% percent of smartphone owners describe themselves as "highly addicted" to their device

• Nearly half (47%) of teenage smartphone owners admit using their device in the toilet, compared to 22% of adults.  (Halliday, 2011)

I use my iPhone for multiple purposes throughout the day from communicating with people, checking the news/weather, or playing games.  Ironically, making actual phone calls is one of functions on my iPhone which is used the least.  One of my most common uses of the iPhone is checking social media sites.  Through this inquiry project, I have learned to utilize the features of RSS and Google Reader to efficiently read through various blogs and websites.  A problem I had in the beginning was that I spent more time using the iPhone then my laptop, and even though I had organized a variety of sites on Google Reader, I did not find myself checking them very often.  I needed to find a better way and fortunately after exploring a few apps (and speaking to the assistant principal/tech investigator at my school) I discovered Pulse News by Alphonso Labs (http://www.pulse.me/).  Pulse is essentially a news reader app that lets you set up the app to download articles from various news sites.  There is also a feature though that allows you to add sites from your Google Reader page.

Choosing Content

Accessing Google Reader

Pulse News lets you easily login to your Google Reader account by using the tab at the bottom left of the screen.  You can then choose which sites from Google Reader you would like to include on your Pulse reader.  Pulse lets you organize the different sources by pages which you can scroll through on the top of the screen.  When using the Pulse app, you are able to scroll horizontally through the different articles or posts for a particular site.  

You drag your finger horizontally across the posts to look at older articles. 

I have also made a focus of utilizing Twitter more frequently throughout this project.  I find that I am constantly learning new ways to use this tool, and there was an initial challenge of figuring out how it could be useful for me in the beginning.  I initially did not find Twitter to be very intuitive to use unless I just wanted to read the posts of the people I happened to be following.  I knew that I would get the most use from Twitter when I could figure out how to utilize the hashtag feature.  The iPhone again came to my rescue when I discovered TweetDeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com/).  The TweetDeck app is organized in columns so that I can have different columns to follow different timelines, or hashtags.  This became important for me when I wanted to follow specific hashtags or specific people.  As I have mentioned in previous posts, I work at a school which uses Twitter as a way to share information about school events.  TweetDeck allows me to determine which account I would like to post under whether it is my personal account or the school.  I have found the use of TweetDeck to be very intuitive, and along with the iPhone it has drastically increased my use of Twitter as a tool.

By using the touchscreen, I can scroll vertically through the different columns I am following, and I can scroll vertically through the actual posts.  The thin, broken line at the top of each column shows me which columns have posts that I have not read.  Creating posts and adding columns is accessed easily through the tabs at the top of the screen.

Halliday, J.  (2011, August 4).  Facebook and Twitter fuel iPhone and Blackberry addiction, says Ofcom.  The Guardian.  Retrieved December 2, 2011 from http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/04/facebook-twitter-iphone-blackberry-addiction-ofcom