Last week Book Creator introduced a great new feature just in time for the start of the new school year. That feature is the option to add video, audio, text, and emoji comments to students' books. The new feature is still in beta, but you can try it right now. You can add comments to any page within books you've created or books that your students have created in your class library.
Watch my short video that is embedded below to see how easy it is to use the new commenting feature in Book Creator.
Applications for Education
The new commenting feature in Book Creator should make it easier than ever to give students feedback on their work in the way that works best for you and for them. It could also be a great tool for student to use for peer-editing.
Learn more about Book Creator in the following blog posts:
Back in June Book Creator added an autodraw feature to the Chrome version of their popular multimedia ebook creation service. Autodraw enables you to attempt to draw something and have Book Creator try to interpret what that drawing is. As you draw Book Creator will display a menu of completed drawings based on what you're attempting to draw. Choose from the menu of suggestions and Book Creator will automatically complete the drawing for you. See this video for an example.
This morning Book Creator announced that the autodraw feature is now available to use on iPads. Run the update for the app and autodraw will appear when you start drawing on a blank page in the Book Creator book editor. Get the updated Book Creator app here.
Book Creator, the massively popular ebook creation tool, has added a new set of drawing tools. A couple of the highlights of the new drawing tools are Magic Ink and Autodraw. Magic Ink is a feature that will enable students to fill the pages of their Book Creator with chalk-like drawings as well as fill drawings with tie-dye style coloring.
Autodraw is a new Book Creator feature that appears to be made for people like me who are not blessed with the ability to draw much more than a stick figure. Autodraw will let people like me start sketching an object and then have it automatically completed in a much clearer form. To use this feature just start drawing on a page in Book Creator and it will try to predict what you're drawing. Book Creator will give you a selection of suggested drawings that you can insert in place of what you have attempted to draw.
Applications for Education
Book Creator's Autodraw feature could remove some of the frustration that students feel when trying to illustrate pages in their ebooks.
Book Creator, one of my favorite tools for creating multimedia ebooks, has announced a new publishing option that many teachers have requested. Book Creator now lets teachers publish entire libraries of their students' books. This library publishing option is in addition to the option to publish individual books.
Publishing an entire library of student-created Book Creator books could be a good way to showcase an entire class' work in one place. If you're building a portfolio of your class' work on a class website or blog, putting the Book Creator library into that website will make it easier for visitors to see contributions from all students in one place. Libraries, like individual books, can be password protected.
Detailed directions for Book Creator library publishing can be found here. In short, you'll find the library publishing option in your teacher dashboard in the new library settings cog.
Adobe Spark and Book Creator are two of my favorite multimedia production tools. And now you can combine the two! Earlier this week Book Creator announced that you can now embed videos made with Adobe Spark into the pages of Book Creator ebooks. But it's not just Adobe Spark videos that you can embed into your Book Creator pages. You can include graphics and even webpages made with Adobe Spark into the pages of Book Creator ebooks.
In the following video I provide a complete overview of how to create an ebook on Book Creator.
And watch the following video for an overview of how to create things on Adobe Spark.
Applications for Education
For years I have been saying that Book Creator is a good tool for students to use to create digital showcases of their best writing, drawings, pictures, and videos. And since its launch a few years ago I have loved using Adobe Spark to make videos. The integration of the two services provides a great opportunity for students to create videos then include them as part of a larger work that they publish through Book Creator.
On Tuesday I shared five ideas for making ebooks with your students. Book Creator is a great tool for making those ebooks. With Book Creator your students can make ebooks that include text, images, audio recordings, videos, and even maps. Students can insert media that they've created or embed content from sites like YouTube and Vimeo into the pages of their ebooks.
In the following video I provide a complete overview of how to create an ebook on Book Creator. In the video you will see how to select a page size, customize the page color, and how to alter the text layout. In the video I also cover embedding content from third-party sites, adding maps to pages, uploading pictures, and recording audio and video directly into Book Creator pages.
You and your students can use Book Creator for free with the limitation of 40 books per account. There is an upgraded, school-wide version that offers real-time collaboration, LMS integration, and an admin dashboard. That school-wide version is on sale in the month of September.
Disclosure: Book Creator is currently an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com
For many years Book Creator was my go-to recommendation for teachers who wanted to have their students create multimedia ebooks on iPads. So when the folks at Book Creator launched an online version to use Google Chrome I quickly added it to my list of recommended web tools too. Book Creator can be used by students to create multimedia ebooks that include video, images, audio, text, and free-hand drawings. You can watch an overview of Book Creator here. After getting familiar with Book Creator consider having your students make one of the following types of ebooks.
1. Multimedia Comic Books
Book Creator offers a half-dozen page layout templates including three specifically designed for students who want to make their own comic books. Within those comic templates students will find options for adding speech and thought bubbles, word art, comic stickers, and clip art to the pages of their comic books. They can also add utilize all of the other Book Creator tools like recording audio and inserting videos into the pages of their comic books.
2. Digital Portfolios
Book Creator supports uploading many kinds of media and then adding that media to the pages of an ebook. This can be a great way to have students build digital portfolios of their best work.
3. How-to Guides
Combining text, pictures, and video on the same page can be an excellent way to build a how-to guide for everything from conducting science experiments to tuning a lawn mower's engine.
4. Creative Writing
Students can enhance their creative writing by adding sound effects, mood music, or spoken words to the pages of their Book Creator ebooks. Students can do this by selecting the option to import media into any page of their ebooks.
5. Multimedia Reports
Watching videos and listening to podcasts is increasingly a part of the research that students do when beginning a research assignment. Rather than just writing summaries of the content of those videos or podcasts, students can embed them into the pages of their reports written in Book Creator.
Ebook Glue is a neat service that I discovered on Lifehacker this evening. Ebook Glue allows you to create an ebook from your blog posts. To use the service just enter your blog's RSS Feed or your blog's URL if you don't know the address of your feed and Ebook Glue will turn your posts into an ePub and Mobi files for you to download, read, and distribute.
I gave Ebook Glue a try with my new iPad Apps for School blog's feed and it did exactly what it advertises. I was able to type in my blog's URL, select ePub, and then download an ePub of the blog entries. Then to read the ePub on my iPad I just uploaded it to my Box.com account and opened it on my iPad.
Applications for Education
If you have your students blogging on a fairly regular basis they may not even notice how much good content they have written over the course of a semester or a year. Turning their blogs into ebooks could be a good way to show them how much they have done.In a high school journalism class you could have students write their articles on a blog then use Ebook Glue to make the content available for distribution in ebook format too.
