'Newspapers B&W (5)' photo (c) 2011, Jon S - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

I’ve spent years trying to find a good application that would let students create their own individual online “newspapers” with personalized content.

Finally, over the past two months, four excellent ones have opened for business.

I found another excellent one today, which is why I’m writing this post.

In order to make it on this list, the application must be free; make the content available in an attractive and accessible way for English Language Learners; and make it very easy to sign-up and add new preferences.

Obviously, a fair amount of the information that shows-up in these feeds is going to be quite challenging for English Language Learners to understand. However, since it’s on the topics they choose, and shown in an attractive form, it will certainly provide high-interest reading material that one can hope they’d want to ‘fight-through” a bit to comprehend.

Here are my choices for The Best Sites For Creating Personalized “Newspapers” Online:

Scoop.it lets you first identify a topic. Then, it continually finds items on the web related to that topic in a nice interface. Then, with one click, it lets you “scoop it” into your own personalized newspaper (that’s what I’m calling it, not them) which you can then share. It’s an ongoing process. I really like it. Even though it’s not open to the public yet, I read about it in Mashable (that same post shares a list of other “curation” sites worth exploring — I think Scoop.it is the best on their list) and they have invitations available here.

News 360 lets you easily create a personalized newspaper. It’s been around for a bit, but it appears to only recently begun allowing registration by email — I hadn’t written about it before because Facebook log-in would not have worked with schools. One difference it appears to have from several of the other personalized virtual newspaper sites is that it’s “smart.” In other words, it will analyze your Google Reader or Facebook feeds to determine interesting stories in addition to letting you determine your subjects of interest.

Pulse is apparently a very popular mobile news reading app, and it just became available on the Web. Like most of these kinds of tools, you can identify your interests and it will show related stories in an engaging interface.

Feedstripes lets you easily create online “magazines” composed of articles on your favorite topics, and you can easily save them for future reading, too. It has a nice interface.

Trove has just been launched by the previous owners of The Washington Post. I’m not sure that it’s radically different from the other sites on this list, but it seems like it’s worth trying out — especially since my previous favorite tool (Trap.it) discontinued their service last week.

My primary concern about it is that — for now, at least — even though you can read Trove on the web, you can only create your own “troves” (updated news articles on the topic of your choice) using it as an iPhone or iPad app. I assume they’ll add that feature to its web version relatively soon. NOTE: They’ve made that change now — you can read Troves on the Web

You can read more about Trove at The New York Times and at TechCrunch.

You Can Now Create Flipboard Magazines On The Web

Feedback and suggestions are welcome!

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