Book Creator Introduction Lesson(s)

One of my favorite online creation tools is Book Creator. It allows students to create interactive multimedia ebooks based off classroom assignments. The FREE version allows teachers to have one library with 40 books. Teachers can archive libraries and delete books and reset the library count to 40 as needed. Obviously the ideal situation is to get a classroom, school, or district subscription and it is something to recommend to administrators, PTA's, or even make a grant pitch for.

I am a certified Google Trainer and Book Creator has very generously offered up their 1,000 book library deal to anyone with that designation, which makes it very nice for training purposes.

Here are a few books I have made for demonstration purposes:

Plastic Bags

Showing Respect in the Halls (Comic Example)

Choose Your Own Adventure Style Book

Biography (Bessie Coleman)

Community Helpers (link to Facebook post...this is a project I completed with a kindergarten class)

Because I love Book Creator so much I do a lot of training with students. teachers, and at various tech conferences. I have done so many trainings that I thought I would share my standard "training" module I use to introduce it with participants. Keep in mind that with students I usually break up the module into four training blocks (40-50 minutes each) with the fifth day moving students into the comic "book" option. Depending on the speed of the class we get to play with the comic book option on day five or we just finish the sample book as noted below.

In the span of four instructional blocks (either with a media specialist, computer lab teacher, or classroom teacher) we complete the following:

Here is the link to the finished book. Lions are a pretty safe subject, as most students know something about them, and I can highlight nonfiction text features as we move along. After these four days students learn enough about the website to be competent but, as I tell teachers, media specialists, and computer lab instructors you still need to teach the hidden skills of pairing like facts, keeping facts simple and clear, matching text and pictures, etc.

If you are struggling with the "how" part of introducing Book Creator to students, please feel free to grab my lesson structure above and watch as students grasp the basic concept of adding, editing, and embellishing text and media within the program. You will be AMAZED at what they naturally pick up on their own!

Comments

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock&

Bill Nye Songs with Lyrics

At the end of the Bill Nye videos he always has a fun song that goes with the episode. You can find many of the songs as stand alone videos on YouTube. This came in handy because today I am teaching a lesson on layers of the atmosphere and found a song from his Atmosphere video on YouTube titled "Fresh Aire." I really wanted to remix it and put the lyrics on the video (so the kids could sing along and see how the lyrics matched the lesson). The first thing I did was found a site that has all the Bill Nye lyrics posted used my YouTube downloader ( see instructions here ) and downloaded the song. I then imported the video into Movie Maker Live and used the caption feature to put the lyrics on the different frames (cutting and pasting from the lyrics site into Movie Maker Live). I saved the video and reposted to YouTube so other teachers could use the video with lyrics (the finished video is posted above). The process was pretty easy and I am thinking about doing it for more

Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

Search This Blog