At Book Creator, we’re big supporters of #CSEdWeek and love advocating for the teaching of coding in schools (without coding, there would be no Book Creator!). Over the years, we’ve seen numerous ways in which teachers have harnessed the power of Book Creator to promote and teach coding, STEM, digital literacy, and digital citizenship.

If you’re planning to host a CSEdWeek event this year, do check out the resources on the csedweek.org website, and draw from the examples and ideas in this post to do some great work!

Teach coding with Book Creator

Here’s a cool idea that came from Dr. Beth Holland. When you think about it, one of the key ideas behind teaching computer science and coding is not about learning the specifics of a single program, language or app. More significantly, we should teach concepts that develop the idea of literacy and fluency around what allows a computer to do the tasks it’s capable of doing.

Don’t focus on teaching coding. Instead focus on computational thinking and creative problem solving.

In this video, Beth discusses how to introduce this concept to a class with a basic grid paper background in Book Creator (she uses Book Creator for iPad, it works equally well in the online app).

If you find this interesting, Beth expands on this idea to introduce the idea of teaching coding as digital storytelling. You can read more about this in her blog post.

Develop your own Computer Science curriculum

Granted it’s a bit of a leap to go from teaching coding to developing a whole curriculum, but some of you will have the resources to be thinking about creating resources to teach an existing Computer Science curriculum. This is exactly what Laurie Guyon did to help her teachers understand how to apply the NYSED Computer Science and Digital Fluency standards.

“We quickly realized that teachers needed to see how to add these standards to their classrooms without it being ‘one more thing’.

Over summer, I decided to create activity books to help teachers see fun ways that these standards can be implemented without it being a heavy lift in their classrooms.” 

Take a look at the library below 👇

You might take advantage of some of the pre-designed themes and templates in Book Creator to create your own resource library for your own digital standards. Hopefully Laurie’s books will inspire you to see what is achievable!

Read more about how Laurie created this library of books.

Christmas Coding Fun and more

We’ve compiled a library of computer science books that have been shared online by teachers from across the world, at varying grade levels. Use these to inspire your own creations or for ideas to get students authoring books to demonstrate their learning.

This library includes robot designs, a magazine, an interview, traditional textbook style materials and a Christmas Coding Adventure! View this library online.

Don’t forget Digital Citizenship

Whenever you’re teaching computer science or related topics, it’s always good to remember the aspects of digital citizenship that keep us all safe online. You can focus on passwords, secure website browsing, and how to avoid downloading dodgy files that give your computer a virus!

We have a series of books we’ve made in conjunction with Common Sense Education that can help with your planning here. Great for K-9.

Learn more about how to use these books.