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

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

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Picture of the Day - Activity

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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

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