In shopping around for a meaningful new way for students to publish their discoveries around Hamlet quotes and themes, I came upon Zeen.

A free, new platform, still in beta, Zeen allows users to curate text, video, images, and links into beautiful digital magazines, using a lovely variety of themes, fonts, colors

Developed by YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, this digital space for magazine creation feels like a kind of hybrid of Pinterest, Tumblr, Paper.li, Themeefy, and Smore, the digital poster creation tool.

Like the design of Smore, Zeen is super-easy to use and allows digital publishers to continue to add modular segments.  Users may integrate Flickr images and YouTube videos and develop textual context around them.  A bookmarklet allows for on-the-fly curation.

Zeens display as vertical magazines, with a handy left nav bar index.

Zeens are sharable on Facebook, Google+, Delicious, and Twitter.  An embed code option appearing on the dashboard, seems to embed a user’s work rather than an individual Zeen.  (See the Zeen material below.)

It would be lovely if documentation traveled over into your Zeen with the media you import.

I can see lots of classroom applications for Zeen.  The Terms page notes that it is for ages 13 and older. Certainly it is a platform for interactive, media-rich student writing. It can be continually updated and function as a type of blog on a global issue. We can use it to publish professional development materials.  It may also serve as a new vehicle for the library monthly/annual report.