Whether you're a Book Creator veteran or a novice - here are some ideas and concepts to help you get the most out of Book Creator in the coming school year.
Refresh your knowledge
If it helps, refer back to our full Getting Started with Book Creator guide for a refresher, or head over to our Certified Author training videos to learn the basics of setting up your account, inviting students and getting to grips with all the features in Book Creator.
The First 5s
Dr. Beth Holland has some ideas on how you might divide your thought processes into 5s - the first 5 days, the first 5 weeks, and the first 5 months.
Read the full post: Building classroom community and culture with Book Creator
Imagine setting up a station with a single iPad, Chromebook, or even desktop during the first week of school and then personally engaging with every student as you co-create a page to introduce them to the class.
With younger students, this might be a first introduction to technology; and with older students, it could afford you the opportunity to make a personal connection through a shared activity.
Book Creator allows for both topic-centered (to-the-point) and topic-chaining communication. Students can clearly articulate their points in writing and still add context through audio, video, and imagery. Providing students with these options gives them multiple avenues through which to express their learning and also indicates that you value their voice.
Within the first five weeks, students also need the opportunity to engage in cooperative and collaborative learning as well as individual endeavors.
This year, how might we encourage our students to develop their global identities and make a contribution to the world?
Armed with Book Creator, consider how your students might capture the voices in their community and share their discoveries with the rest of the world.
Teach literacy with Book Creator
Our new literacy guide showcases how versatile Book Creator is in not only creating standards-aligned content, but also ensuring students are motivated, engaged, and have accessibility to the learning goals.
We’ve also created a remixable template for each of the 5 pillars of literacy. These templates support educators in using technology to transform the learning experiences for students and propel them towards becoming proficient readers and writers.
Learn more and get the templates here.
Capturing student work with digital portfolios
One of the great ways you can use Book Creator is to set up a portfolio for students at the start of the year, to capture their progress. Doing this at the start of the year will save you a lot of effort later on!
You have a few options to consider when thinking about how to set up for creating portfolios. Depending on how many libraries you have in your Book Creator account, you could consider:
- 1 library per student
- 1 book per student
- 1 section in a book per student
You might also want to use this remixable digital portfolio template to give you a big headstart!
If you have a district account our new portfolio feature can help you follow student learning journeys over the years with ease.
Configuring your libraries
Remember, if you're on the free plan, you'll only have 1 library so you'll need to be strategic about how you manage the 40 books allocation. But if you or your school has paid for a subscription, you'll have unlimited libraries on the 1,000 book plan.
So, at the start of the year, decide how you want to configure your libraries. You might set up a class library, or divide libraries into different subjects or grades, or create a library for a specific project.
Remember your My Books library allocation is separate, so use that for your draft books or other personal work.
See more: Housekeeping for the new year
Setting up collaboration
Speaking of collaboration, the power of Book Creator really comes alive when students work together.
If you're on a paid plan, you have access to real-time collaboration - just turn on the setting in your library. You could partner up students, or have the whole class working on one book. (Tip: that's also a good time to highlight good digital citizenship and why you don't delete other people's work!).
Don't forget to take advantage of our 14-day free trial for our real-time collaboration feature!
You can choose who has access to the book when collaborating
Use journals for authentic assessment
Our new STEM notebooks show how Book Creator can transform learning (and this could be applied to any subject). These notebooks are created for any science course and built around the 5E instructional model of science, engineering principles and design thinking.
Learn more from Katie Fielding's example and get her templates here.
To add this book to your library, click Remix and a copy of this book will be added to the library of your choice.
Foster Digital Citizenship
The start of the year is always a good time to introduce digital citizenship, and Book Creator can help with this. As you introduce the features of Book Creator, talk about why it's important to use a safe search for images, and why it's better to use copyright free images and how to properly cite them.
You can discuss what information is ok or not to share when publishing books online, and why you it's important to respect each other's work when collaborating on books together.
If you're looking for curriculum resources for teaching digital citizenship - we have just the thing! We partnered with Common Sense Education to bring you these three educational activity books.
Catherine is a Teacher Success Manager at Book Creator. As a former educator, she supports schools and districts in implementing Book Creator into their curriculum and instruction. She loves showing educators how they can simply bring creativity and student voice into their classroom.
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