Years ago, one of the first uses of the iBooks issued to Maine's middle school students that impressed me was a magazine project completed as part of a civics lesson. If I recall correctly, the students used Pages to create their magazines. The students seemed to be highly engaged in creating the best magazines they that could. Their final products were printed. The students were quite proud of their work. Unfortunately, back then the web wasn't nearly as robust as it is today and the students' audience was limited.
Today, students can create multimedia magazines and distribute them globally through the web. Here are four good options for creating multimedia magazines and distributing them online. Jump to the end of the article for another idea about using multimedia magazines in the classroom.
Lucidpress is a slick for collaboratively creating multimedia documents. If you watch the video below you'll notice that
Lucidpress has some similarities to Google Documents. In fact, you can use your Google Account to sign into Lucidpress and you can use items stored in your Google Drive account in your Lucidpress documents. Lucidpress has commenting and sharing features that are similar to Google Drive too. What makes Lucidpress different from Google Documents is the selection of layouts and the layout customizations available to you. I look at Lucidpress as being the best of Apple's Pages and the best of Google Documents combined into one slick service.
Update 12/26/2014 - SimpleBooklet is no longer free. Glossi has gone offline.
Simple Booklet is a service that I've shared with teachers for a few years now. To create a book using Simple Booklet just sign-up for a free account and click create. Select the layout template that suits your needs. To add content click anywhere on the blank canvas and a menu of options will appear. You can add text, images, audio files, videos, and links to each page of your booklet. In the field for adding text there is an option to copy from Word documents. Each page of your Simple Booklet can have multiple elements on it. To include videos you can upload your own files or select from a variety of provides including SchoolTube, TeacherTube, YouTube, and others. To add audio to your pages you can upload your own files or again select from the online hosts Last.fm, Sound Cloud, or Mix Cloud. When you're done building pages in your Simple Booklet you can share it online by embedding it into a webpage or you can share the unique link generated for your booklet.
Glossi is a service for creating digital magazines. Glossi magazines can include images, videos, audio files, and links to external sources of information. The magazines that you create are displayed with page-turning effects. Your magazines can be embedded into your blog. Learn more about Glossi in the video below.
This post would be incomplete if I did not mention iBooks Author. If your school has modern MacBooks, your students can use iBooks Author to create and publish multimedia magazines. iBooks Author is a powerful too, but to master it takes more time than it does to master the three services mentioned above. To help you get started using iBooks Author I recommend spending some time with the following tutorial resources.
Publishing with iBooks Author is a free 110 page publication from O'Reilly Media. I just discovered the guide a couple of days ago and I wish I had found it earlier because it would have saved me a lot of time in learning how to use iBooks Author. Publishing with iBooks Author covers everything from copyright, DRM, and the End User Agreement to templates, layouts, media insertion, publishing, and distribution. You will have to register for an O'Reilly Media account to download the book (that does take a few minutes and requires email verification) but I think that's a small price to pay for an excellent free ebook.
Publishing with iBooks Author is available to download as an ePub file and as a PDF.
Kinetic Media has a nearly one hour video that takes you through every aspect of creating an iBook with iBooks Author. The video covers everything from choosing a template to using custom HTML5 widgets in your iBooks. That video is embedded below.
If sitting through a one hour video like the Kinetic Media iBooks Author video is a bit too much for you, take a look at this playlist of
25 iBooks Author tutorials from DIY Journo. The videos cover the same things as in the Kinetic Media tutorial, but each tutorial is its own short video.
Applications for Education
Creating a multimedia magazine could be a good way for students to create a digital portfolio. To form a multimedia magazine students can pull together videos, pictures they've taken, and documents they've written throughout the school year.
