Book Creator for Windows - Create Multimedia eBooks

Book Creator has long been a popular iPad and Android app for creating multimedia ebooks. Today, the developers of Book Creator released a Windows version of the app.

Book Creator for Windows (Windows 8.1 or higher required) allows anyone to create his or her own ebooks using images, text, videos, and audio recordings. You can arrange your book in three different formats; portrait, square, or landscape. Each page in your book can include pictures and videos. In addition to the pictures and videos you can include as much as text as you can fit on each page. In fact, if you just want to have text on a page you can do that. If you would like to narrate your book you can tap the record button to add your voice to each page of your book. Every page in your book can have a custom color scheme.


Book Creator for Windows from Book Creator on Vimeo.

Applications for Education
Book Creator can be a fantastic tool for students to use to create short stories or to create longer research papers that include multimedia elements.

MyStudyLife - A Student Planner for All Platforms

About eighteen months ago I wrote about a nice planner app for students called MyStudyLife. At the time MyStudyLife was only available as a Windows 8 app and as a web app. This afternoon at BETT 2015 I met the lead developer of MyStudyLife and learned that the service is now available on iOS and Android too.

My Study Life allows students to organize tasks according to their course schedules. When students start using the app they have to enter their courses. After entering their courses into My Study Life students can start to enter tasks into each course. Each task is assigned a due date. Students' My Study Life homepage shows them the tasks that have due dates approaching.

Applications for Education
Whether or not a planner helps a student is usually determined by whether or not the student gets in the habit of using it. My Study Life could be an excellent service for students to get into the habit of using to keep track of their assignments.

GeoGebra for Windows 8, iOS, and Android

This fall GeoGebra released new apps for Android, iPad, and Windows 8. All three of the apps include the graphing and modeling tools available on your desktop. The apps also include GeoGebraTube in which you can search for the things that other GeoGebra users have created. The video embedded below provides an overview of the Windows 8 GeoGebra app (the video does not have sound).

Reading RSS Feeds on Windows 8

In my on-going efforts to explore alternatives to Google Reader and familiarize myself with Windows 8 applications I recently tried using Bing News on my Lenovo Yoga 13. This week the app was updated and it now allows me to add any RSS feed whether it's featured by Bing or not. Once you've added a feed by entering the URL for the feed, you can put it into a category in the app. It's important to note that you have to enter the feed URL not the site URL in order to add a subscription (it's kind of like the early days of Google Reader and I hope that Microsoft changes that in the future).

What I like about the Bing News app is the clean and full layout of articles as I browse through them. What I don't like is that in order to share a story or bookmark a story, I have to open the "charms" menu then select share then select the app through which I want to share the story. It's not difficult, but it adds one more step than I typically use in Feedly or Flipboard. Overall, it's not a bad app but I'm still more inclined to use Feedly's Chrome app when I want to browse through my RSS feeds on my Windows 8 computer.

Cinelab - Simple Video Editing for Windows 8

Cinelab is a free Windows 8 app for quickly editing videos on your computer or Windows 8 phone. You can trim the start and end times of your video clips and combine clips to create a new video. To edit a clip and or create a new compilation of clips open the Cinelab app and start a new project. To get your project rolling import clips stored on your computer or phone. To edit an imported clip right-click on it then drag the start and stop indicators into position. You can preview and edit your projects as many times as you like.

Applications for Education
One of the blogging activities that I think is often overlooked is having students post short video updates to a classroom blog. The videos could be observations of things they discovered during a field trip, a science experiment, or just things they've learned during the week. Cinelab could be a good Windows 8 app for students to use to do some quick editing of those videos to post on classroom blogs or their own blogs.

Watch Pandas and More on the National Zoo App

For the last two weeks I've been trying to use Windows 8 as much as possible. I'm using a Lenovo Yoga 13 to try a bunch of Windows 8 apps. One app that I tried last week that I think elementary school teachers and students will like is the National Zoo app for Windows 8. The National Zoo app features live webcam feeds of panda bears, lions and their cubs, tigers, cheetahs, and fish. Because these are live webcams sometimes you'll see the animals and sometimes you won't. If the webcam feed isn't showing the animals when you're viewing it you can switch to the gallery of still imagery.

Applications for Education
I wish that the National Zoo app had more information to accompany the imagery of the animals, but it's still a nice app that elementary school students can use to see some unique animals.