Flipping Amazing: Using the Flipboard app to enhance student learning through new mobile digital environments

Digital technology continues to grow, develop and pervade aspects of people’s everyday lives, including how they communicate, access and retrieve their information. With the proliferation of ‘smart’ mobile devices amongst the population this has filtered through to virtually all industries and spheres of business not to mention that of education. This paper presents the initial findings in the first stage of a larger study which examines the use of pre-existing mobile apps (in this case Flipboard) to curate relevant information for undergraduate students to access through their smartphones or tablet devices. Findings (from creation and use of a digital repository through the app) revealed the students were highly receptive to such a resource for their studies, with much higher engagement rates of access and usage than more traditional academic sources. As such the research indicates that there is huge potential to harness such digital technology as a teaching and learning resource.