Skip to main content

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:

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!


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Secret Messages - How To (Light and Color)

This was fun activity that I got from Roper Mountain Science Institute. They suggested red theater gel to reveal the message, which can get pricy. Another idea I heard was to ask movie theaters to donate left over 3D glasses, which also have a red filter. A guest speaker we had last year said red jello would work. Tried it this week and it worked like a charm. The students thought it was very cool. I found my "attention challenged" students had trouble focusing on making their own secret messages so I was very glad that I had made extra copies of the sheets from the GEMS Color Analyzer book that they could color and then check under the jello.
2 comments
Read more

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.
13 comments
Read more

QR Project - Open House

Twitter Post Link -  https://bit.ly/3Umic7r I saw this adorable QR code project on Twitter and decided to try it out with a couple of third grade classes. We have several schools in our district who are "Leader in Me" schools and I asked a teacher if I could come in and make them for her open house (you don't need to be a "Leader in Me" school but I know they do a lot of goal setting and mission statements). She loved the idea! I decided to use Flip (formally Flipgrid) to do the recording. The web based program is free for educators and automatically generates the needed QR code. We started on a Thursday. I pulled students into the hall to get a picture of them holding a square piece of paper prior to an ELA block. The paper acted as a place holder for the QR code (which is square) and ensured I got the correct hand spacing so the students looked like they were holding the QR code. I found a spot that didn't have anything in the background. The background...
Post a Comment
Read more