Book Creator Adds New Accessibility Features

Book Creator is a tool that I have been using and recommending for years for making multimedia ebooks. You can use it as an iPad app or in your web browser. This week Book Creator announced that it now works in Microsoft Edge as well as Chrome and Safari. That's not the only product enhancement Book Creator released this week.

Some of the other Book Creator enhancements made this week include support for dictation in 120 languages, auto-generating captions on videos, and auto transcription of audio recordings. Automatic captioning of videos can be activated for videos that are recorded directly through the Book Creator app as well as videos that are uploaded to Book Creator pages. Likewise, automatic transcription of audio can be activated for files recorded directly in Book Creator as well as files that are added from external sources. Captions and transcripts are available in 120 languages.


Applications for Education
Students can use Book Creator to create ebooks that contain pictures, videos, audio recordings, drawings, and text. Those are just some of the types of the things that students can add to their Book Creator books. That flexibility is what has made Book Creator a popular choice for making ebooks to tell fiction and non-fiction stories. And lately I've seen teachers using Book Creator to develop professional development training materials.

How to Embed Google Calendar Into Blogger, WordPress, and Google Sites

Last week I got a couple of questions about an old video of mine in which I demonstrated embedding Google Calendar into Blogger. Google Calendar and Blogger have changed in the years since I made that video. That's why last night I decided to create the following new video about how to embed Google Calendar into Blogger, WordPress, and Google Sites.


Applications for Education
Putting a Google Calendar into your classroom blog or school website can be a good way to provide parents with a go-to place for information about upcoming assignments and events. A couple of years ago I worked with a school that used Google Calendar embedded into their website to display the school lunch menu.

Quickly Create Collaborative Maps With Ethermap

Google's My Maps tool is great for students to use to collaborate on the creation of custom maps. The problem with it is that students must have Google accounts in order to use it. Ethermap solves that problem by not requiring users to have any kind of email account.

Ethermap is a new tool that anyone can use to create online maps. Ethermap lets users share maps and collaborate on maps by simply sharing a link. In the following video I demonstrate how to use Ethermap to create an online map.


Learn how to use Google Maps & Earth in Your Classroom
If you are interested in learning how to use Google Maps or Google Earth, take a look at my on-demand webinar titled Google Maps & Earth – More Than Just Social Studies.

Three Google Forms Tutorials for Beginners

Last night my friend Beth emailed me to ask if I had any tutorials for beginning Google Forms users. My answer was, "I sure do!" These were the three Google Forms tutorials that sent to her to share with the group of teachers she's working with right now.

This one covers all the basics:



This one covers how to combine forms:


And this one covers 5 things every teacher should know about forms:


But wait! There's more! If you call now I'll throw in How to Create an Activity Tracker With Google Forms:

Rubrics and Originality Reports in Google Classroom

Last week Google announced that Originality Reports in Google Classroom would soon be available to all users with the limitation that you could only run three reports unless your school subscribes to G Suite for Education Enterprise Edition (the paid version of G Suite for Education). As of yesterday afternoon (Eastern Time) Originality Reports are now available in all G Suite for Education domains.

What are Originality Reports?
Originality Reports in Google Classroom let you check documents for elements of plagiarism originality against the millions of webpages and books that are indexed by Google. Students are able to run Originality Reports on their own work before submitting it as an assignment in Google Classroom.

Rubrics in Google Classroom
Last August Google launched a beta of rubrics in Google Classroom. As of yesterday's announcement by Google, rubrics are now available to all teachers using Google Classroom. In the following video I demonstrate how to use rubrics in Google Classroom. It should be noted that since I made this video Google did introduce the option to reuse rubrics from assignment to assignment.