Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Publishing your own magazine

As part of my students LA program they are creating a magazine. They will be publishing it at their electronic portfolios . I am trying out a few tools.

One is Issuu. Issuu is a site that allows you 100mb uploads of magazines. Create these in a program that allows you to export them as pdf and you can upload them to issuu. I am attempting this and seeing how to get the job done. I have melded a picture from flickr, a keynote presentation and a google doc. When it is done it should look like this...

This embed gives you lots of options. You can just scroll through the magazine here in small view. Or you can go to Issuu and see it full screen. Just like voicethread you can enlarge the picture and zoom in and out.

One of the issues that surrounds this is creating one pdf file. The links they give for software to eliminate this problem are
for mac Combine PDFs 3.0
and for windows PDF helper 1.01

I also tried scribd. It seems easy and is similar to At the time of this post I had to reload the pdf and go again.
(15+ minutes later)It seems to take longer than . I am still waiting. Perhaps there is a file limit. This will be a real downer for the kids if the upload takes this long.
At 20 minutes...
Yeah it finally made it. Here is the same material on scirbd



Either way this is a really cool way to embed some spectacular work at a students eportfolio or just to publish work. I am looking forward to how the student use these tools and how they can teach me.

5 comments:

User Host said...

I've been using Scribd.com ever since I launched, but the service you mentioned called Issuu is looking interesting also. I'm giving that a test run today.

I have been able to put Scribd.com's features to good use. I've especially enjoyed the ability to embed the publications into websites. They also let you track traffic to your publication, and the rating system is pretty good too. Overall its a pretty solid service.

Mr. H said...

I used both services at school and they worked really fast and equally well. I will leave it up to the kids to decide which service to use. Issuu looks like a magazine. That might be the deciding factor.

Thanks Jon for the comment.

Jason said...

It's important to remember that Scribd will convert PDFs, Word docs, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, OpenOffice documents, and other formats. Scribd scans your text and makes the text in your document searchable.

Issuu supports only PDFs and uses non-searchable images.

Ana Concejero said...

Hi,
I like both of them but I find Issuu a bit more interesting than Scribb.
Have you tried this?
http://www.youconvertit.com/ it enables you to convert any file format without downloading or installing anything.Really useful to convert to PDF.
By the way, thanks for your blog.

Mr. H said...

Thanks for the converter link Ana. I appreciate the comment and I will pass on the converter to the kids. They like Issuu because it looks so glossy. I am seeing many different possibilities with scribd.

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