How to Create Your Own Digital Magazine


There is a lot of content out there. I’m sure you agree. The web is full of websites, blogs, journals and other platforms that (try to) provide you with online content. I’ve already wrote about how you can organize all the information you care about and want to remember. This time I’ll tell you how to make an extra step by creating your own online magazine, in order to serve your own content (e.g. blog posts) or articles you read elsewhere and find really interesting and worth sharing. It is also an easy way for you and your students to become content curators by collecting articles and blog posts that help them understand and learn.
A great service for that is Flipboard.



Flipboard is the most popular content curation and discovery platform today. It is mainly used on smartphones or tablets, but it also provides a nice web view of online magazines, created either by media outlets or individual users - people with interests. Just like you. In the latest version (following Flipboard’s acquisition of Zite, which is another popular content discovery app) you can follow individual users, magazines or topics.


Every article you read via the Flipboard app has a + icon that allows you to add the article in your own magazine. You can also install a browser extension and do the same thing on any article or blog post directly from your browser.
To get started, you need to create an account. To do this, you need to download the Flipboard app on a smartphone or tablet. The app is free and it is available for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and even Blackberry. Once you create an account, you can start using the app to discover content and you can also create your own magazine. We’ll focus on the second.
You don’t have to use the app to create and curate your own magazine. You can do it straight from your computer. Just head to editor.flipboard.com and begin by creating a new magazine. From the “Share” menu, you can get the browser extension or the bookmarklet that will make it really easy to add content to your magazine.



You can create many magazines. You can have one targeted to lower grade students and one for a higher ed audience, for example. Remember: You don’t have to do all the writing. You can simply find and add articles from other sources, people you follow and trust. This is what curation is all about. Going through all the blogs you follow and filtering the information in order to share the best and the ones that are really worth sharing. Following the education topic on Flipboard can give you some content to start with, but I’m sure you already have some educators and authors in mind. 

You can follow my magazine on education here: educationfwd.com

 This post is part of the When EdTech Meets ELT series, my regular column for the TESOL Macedonia Thrace Northern Greece e-bulletin, and was originally published in September 2014.

Image credit: flickr.com/photos/51590961@N04/6899108973/Author: Michael J

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