Bored of word documents?
Tired of hand drawn pictures or posters?
Want to bring in some Web 2.0 tools to output student knowledge?
Magazine covers is a quick and easy way to do this in a colorful and different media. If you want to have information presented to you in a neat, concise, professional looking manner that was is that little bit different, you can create your magazine cover with pictures and content of your choice, even down to the sales price!
This customizable tool is great for all students, especially those who sadly have inadequate artistic talents, but wish to satisfy their creativity digitally. The cover can be edited many times and themes / designs, fonts as well as text colors are changeable. When you are happy with the finished product, you can simply save it and download to your computer to keep and use over again. With a little guidance, your students could create these covers in next to no time and with a color printer and glossy paper, they can display their work on the wall immediately, or simply just post it to their class blog or wiki.
Some challenges I encountered when designing the magazine cover were getting the correct color combinations, positioning the words in the correct place and choosing the picture itself though all these problems are easily fixable after you have used the tool a few times. The magazine cover above is simple, but in total, it only took me about 15 minutes to learn how to use the tool, design the cover and save the copy.
All in all, a great differentiated output tool for students to express themselves in a novel and creative way.