Literacy is one of the greatest gifts a person could receive. -Jen Selinsky
My kindergarten students are becoming voracious readers and most of them are ready for some fresh book selections. I like to create books for them to read and you can read more about that here. While I love using iBooks Author to create multi-touch books, I realize not everyone has access to a Macbook to create them. A good alternative is Book Creator. This is one of my students’ favorite apps to use, and it is a great way for educators to create their own texts.
Quick and easy are two mandates from time-pressed educators in creating learning materials for students. In fact, my dissertation topic will be looking at the successes achieved in classrooms that use e-books to enhance literacy and creating an implementation model. Why aren’t more educators creating their own texts? Is it will or skill? Or, is it a lack of awareness of the power of these texts in literacy development? (Your comments below would be very welcome here as I am starting to research my topic!)
Anyway, back to quick and easy…Book Creator meets this demand. Take a quick inventory of your students’ interests and get to work! The boys in my classroom love dirt bikes and super heroes. Ten minutes later, I have 2 books cranked out to be added to their iPads. My girls love Disney princesses and baby animals. Ten more minutes and 2 more books. I use the Add Sound feature to assist with some necessary vocabulary words. I underline the word, speak the word using Add Sound, and place the speaker icon next to the underlined word. Then I upload the book to Showbie, our workflow app. My kindergarten students are able to go into Showbie independently and download the books to their iBooks app.
Here are a few screen shots:
My students have been independently reading and partner reading with these books. Some have asked if they can create their own books with drawings they have created on the iPad. One student started his own Super Hero book last week because I omitted one his favorites. Way to problem solve!!
Watching their excitement each time they download a new book is satisfaction enough for me. When they ask me for more, I remind them they are able to create their own books as well!
If you have Book Creator, I hope you will work on creating some books for your students. If you don’t, what are you waiting for?
Today we will do exciting new things. Let’s get to it!
iTeach with iPads 
As for me it is lack of knowledge – just got a Mac Book for Christms – hey can I talk you into giving lessons on making ibooks?!?
Absolutely Grace. Not hard at all.
Can a grandparent get this program on ipad to have grandchild create his own story?
Absolutely. Just download Book Creator from the App Store.
I really enjoy using Book Creator with my K class. I find it so frustrating that Book Creator files do not Air Drop. Thanks for the Showbie tip.
Beth
Thanks for your comment. Book Creator and Showbie play nicely together. You can upload a working copy of a book from Book Creator into Showbie and the kids can download it directly into Book Creator on their iPads to continue working on it.
Kristi
Down here in Brazil it’s a combination of lack of will and skill: we’re a little behind on the use of the iPad in schools and, consequently, the majority of teachers have no knowledge of the basic tools. Also, there’s little time in their agenda to go and explore (I don’t know how YOU have the time to create such great works!) and I guess they don’t yet feel that learning theses skills is something worth investing in. But I’m sure this will change soon! Thanks for sharing your ideas.
Thanks so much for your comment. This is so good to know. I know many here feel like they just don’t have the time to plan and implement these tools. Writing these books takes only a short time and they yield big results. I wonder if connecting the practice with student achievement would help encourage educators to invest the time?
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I used Book Creator to make books for my kinders for our recent nonfiction reading unit. It was life changing! The audio feature for select words provided a scaffold for some of that tricky content-related vocabulary. I was also able to satisfy my students thirst for more information by including “fun facts” that were beyond their reading level, but made accessible to the kids through the audio recording. This is a unit where my students usually plateau with their reading, but most have moved at least 2 reading levels! It has also been fantastic for my struggling readers to support 1:1 matching. I have been making simple patterned texts for them and providing audio for each word to help them build their voice-print matching. Book Creator has completely changed my instruction this year!
How wonderful! The fun facts idea is great! Book Creator is such a versatile tool.
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