Teacher creativity and personal enrichment with Book Creator

Summer is a chance to take care of your personal and professional self by making time to explore, play, and experiment with hobbies and activities that we often don’t have time for during the school year.

Book Creator projects aren't just for your students—they can help you create your own passion projects, and collect personal enrichment experiences, too.

Creative projects

Make time for yourself through these creative projects made with Book Creator. Leverage multimedia and the ability to embed maps, videos, and other content alongside text.

🏞️ Family albums

I love flipping through old family albums. While visiting family this summer, create an album that you can share instantly with relatives wherever they live, or create an album alongside relatives by using the collaboration features of Book Creator.

• Add portraits to keep up to date images of family.
• Include video of sports, performances, or how-to videos like recipe instructions.
• Drop in audio recordings of interviews to archive family histories.

🏝️ Summer vacation highlights

Document your travels, whether it’s out of town, or exploring local sites you’ve always meant to visit. Create this after the fact, or as a personal reference guide made in advance that you can take with you. Share these later with family and friends who plan to visit these same places.

• Add photos for each spot: outside shots, interiors, and closeup details.
• Embed a map with dropped pins to mark locations you visited.
• Add links to businesses, museum and historical organizations, email and phone numbers for your contacts in those locations.

🧗‍♀️ Passion project publications

Make time for your personal hobbies by using Book Creator to capture, archive, and create interactive guides for your personal passions.

• Create guidebooks/manuals for local sports teams you belong to, including rules, plays, and maps of game locations.
• A digital writing journal, capturing your thoughts, essays, poetry, or reviews. Add illustrations, photos, and audio of you reading these aloud.
• Gardening guides for your yard or community: add landscaping plans and maps, images of plants you use or hope to use, how-to videos (planting, pruning, watering).
• Create a magazine around your favorite topics and enlist others to help you write, create photos and video, then publish and share globally.

Personal enrichment

Book Creator is also a great way to organize and process your professional experiences. Use it as a personal learning journal, or collaborate with friends or colleagues where each of you can contribute to a single Book Creator project.

📚 Book Clubs

While in-person or video conference meetings are always great ways to discuss books, consider publishing a book club journal that documents your, or each members’ thoughts, and add other resources like links to background historical and author information, and critical reviews. Add pages as your reading list expands.

🎓 Professional development journals

Remembering and organizing ideas gathered at conferences can be a challenge. Keep track of the inspiration, resources, and documents gathered and created while at conferences with a Book Creator learning journal. Make it just for yourself, or invite colleagues to add content from sessions they attended or at other events related to your curricular goals.

Work inspired by play

Good work has deep roots in play, and using Book Creator for your own personal and professional needs helps you understand the process better, and become a model for your students and colleagues. Share the books you’ve created with others in your learning community and offer creative book authoring challenges like:

• Community family albums as a way to create a Who’s Who of your school.
• PTA family cookbooks to celebrate diverse backgrounds and interests.
• Learning journals for students, parents, and administrators to show everyone’s progress and model lifelong learning.
• Collaborative books made with students around shared interests.

Book Creator projects are a way to learn about much more than our curriculum—they help us learn about ourselves and make personal connections to build stronger communities.

What do you think? Would you add anything to the list? Do you have any of your own examples to share? Let me know in the comments below.