On Wednesday afternoon I received the following question from a reader:

One thing I struggle with is a user friendly online newspaper/magazine creator that kids can build throughout the school year. We are a Google Doc school and using Pages is cumbersome with the saving, uploading, downloading…..

Any ideas?


My immediate response was to suggest trying Lucidpress. I’ve often described Lucidpress as a mix of the best of Apple’s Pages with the best of Google Docs. Through Lucidpress you and your students can collaboratively create documents that incorporate videos and images.

The process of creating a document on Lucidpress can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. To get started you might stick with the basics of moving text and pictures around on the document by just dragging and dropping. There are options for layering images with differing amounts of transparency, image cropping tools, and font customization options in each Lucidpress template. As mentioned above, you can also add videos into your projects (obviously they only play when viewed online).

Lucidpress has a Google Classroom integration that makes it easy to have all of your students start using the Lucidpress platform. Watch the video below to learn more about that feature.

According to their pricing page (scroll to the bottom of the page), Lucidpress is offered for free to education users.