Classrooms around the country are gravitating towards Book Creator as a tool to give voice, design authority, and ease of sharing to students and educators alike. With over 100 million books created on the platform, it’s clear that Book Creator’s intuitive platform and educator-friendly features provide an asset to K-12 classrooms.
Essentially, Book Creator is a content creation tool specializing in eBooks. Like many design platforms, Book Creator offers a free and paid version, depending on your needs and budget. Teachers can create eBooks for students to access and read during a lesson, or students can create their own books for assessments and demonstration of learning. The platform offers a plethora of templates ranging in comic book style to a more sophisticated magazine aesthetic for developing young writers looking to add something dynamic to their portfolio.
While there are downloading and printing capabilities to create permanent artifacts for teachers and students, most Book Creator users take advantage of the audio, visual, and hyperlink opportunities for interactive digital products. The site and app’s bank of shapes, graphics, and fonts takes off some of the design pressure, but users can also enjoy importing their own photographs, audio, and video to customize their projects.
Elementary Benefits
Improve Literacy
K-5 teachers love Book Creator for improving their students’ foundational literacy with the digital edge. Book Creator works seamlessly with iPads for those elementary classrooms equipped with iPads or tablets. Young readers will appreciate the new Read-to-me feature on Chrome which allows students to click on the word or phrase and have that unfamiliar word read aloud. Teachers can also read and record their own books that they have created, which can be especially advantageous while students are working through stations. Being able to hear their teacher read stories to them at their own pace will build their autonomy, with natural differentiation.
Reuse and Adapt Resources
Book Creator allows teachers to create books and resources that will serve them across curriculum and time. For instance, teachers could create a book to reinforce concepts of phonics, like this example here, while also serving as a frontloading and preview activity for a science lesson. Teachers can use these books from year to year with ease, as the platform allows you to edit content, updating with new videos or other fresh, relevant content.
eBooks Elevate Engagement
Elementary teachers may also find that the eBook format simply engages students at a higher level than traditional books. Because students can intermittently watch the embedded videos or hear occasional supplemental sound effects, they’ll be more likely to sustain longer reading intervals. While there is a time and place for physical books, there is no doubt that eBooks have the interactivity element that so many digital native learners crave.
Secondary Benefits
Learning through the eBook Production Process
At the secondary level, students can benefit from the creation features of Book Creator. By creating an eBook, students are engaging in a multi-step, complex writing and design process that is sure to improve their stamina and patience. They’ll inherently have to make many written and visual rhetorical decisions to properly engage their reader, either informing or entertaining them. Many secondary teachers today find that they get stumped in determining what product students will create, with some products feeling contrived or dated. An eBook on Book Creator serves as an outlet for authentic publishing on a prolific educational publishing site. When students see examples on Book Creator’s site from other middle and high school level students, they’re bound to be inspired.
Embedding Creativity
Fostering creativity at the secondary level has never been more important. Teachers around the world are considering how to infuse opportunities to allow their students to show their understandings in more creative and dynamic methods. In his blog, Sam Kary provides some great examples of assessments that could seamlessly translate to using Book Creator. For instance, students in a social studies or ELA class could write a biography of a historical figure and publish an eBook to share with their classmates in a virtual gallery walk. Through the writing and design process, students will practice informative writing skills, integrating, linking and properly citing sources, and considering audience engagement as they design the sequence of the book.
A Sense of Community
Book Creator also provides endless opportunities for collaborative writing for students. Teachers, too, have access to student projects so they can offer valuable feedback in real time. Middle or high school teachers may consider units where the class could curate a collection of their writing. For instance, Book Creator houses lots of examples of poetry collections. Students across a class, building, district, or even cross-school could produce collections of poetry organized by theme, style, or any other focus based on the curricular focus. When students see that their contribution makes up a bigger whole, they are more likely to go the extra mile.
Digital Portfolios
Increasingly, colleges and post-secondary institutions are seeking robust student portfolios that showcase the students’ digital content creation ability. Students can certainly embed their Book Creator eBook’s within a digital portfolio (like a Google Site) or they can use Book Creator to create the actual portfolio. Each page, then, becomes the space for students to link the work, write up a reflection, or explain the creation process behind the piece. By compiling a sophisticated and organized collection of their own work, they’ll be sure to stand out to wherever they are applying.
Sharing with Ease and Pride
Whether it’s a teacher publishing an eBook for a one-day lesson or a student creating an eBook that captures their work from an entire school year, Book Creator is allowing educators and young people to produce stand-out work. With an intuitive and user-friendly interface and a continually evolution to be on-trend with updated aesthetics, apps, and extensions, Book Creator is clearly in tune with what contemporary classrooms need today. It provides a fun space to produce eBooks that can be shared with pride.