Shared Stories, Shared Questions

Recently I stopped into a colleagues room (shout out to Meegan in 3rd grade–woot! Thanks for letting me steal your idea!!) and we started talking about Book Creator (of course, because I adore this app, if you couldn’t tell). She was telling me about how her kids had used Book Creator to publish their Personal Narratives. In their published copy they included their written text, hand drawn pictures, and then recorded the voice reading the story. As most of the people in my school do, they shared the books with each other through handy dandy google drive. What I really liked though, was that the learning didn’t stop there. They had been working on questioning, so while they were reading each other’s books they wrote questions on sticky notes about the story. Then they posted them in one spot. Examples:

 

As students went to read a a classmates book they would also check here for a question about that book to answer. Then they can create a new question to put up on the board. What an easy way to really engage kids with a purpose while reading their friends’ stories!

I can imagine other extensions too…

How about using the app Post-it Plus to have the students snap a picture of the post its and then organize them into Costa’s level of questioning (similar to the levels Jan Richardson also uses)–in the text, inferential, and those thought provoking questions without answers. It might help the students really think about the stories in new ways.

Or what if you had a “featured” book or two each week, so you could set up some discussions on Schoology or Kidblog with the student authors of the books. I’m sure students would love to feel like the center of attention and answer questions/comments about their masterpiece.

Oh the possibilities!

Breaking Down Barriers

                 

I’ve been working hard to break down barriers in my classroom this year.  Sometimes this means learning barriers–like lack of opportunity or resources, and sometimes it means the physical borders.  I have listed a Donors Choose to try to get my students some resources for a makerspace, I started a coding club, began bringing skype into my classroom, and just finished one of my favorite projects–a collaborative e-book created using Book Creator.

I love the features of Book Creator that allows you to combine books. We have used this many times in the younger grades to create class books, but I thought I’d like to take it to another level by finding a classroom in each region of the US to write about their area and then combining it into a collaborative e-book.  I used Twitter to track down 4 willing classes (plus ourselves) who would represent their own regions by creating a chapter for our book. We kept guidelines minimal as I thought it would be fun to see how each group decided to share information.  Generally there was just a list of topics each class should cover for their region, and of course the setup (landscape layout), so the pages could easily be combined.

My kids were super excited about collaborating on a project with other classrooms and I think they were super proud to know that their work would be “published” for other students to enjoy.  We had fun deciding how to share information, and used tools such as DoInk for green screen and Chatterpix.  We also decided to include some videos in our project, so the other students could enjoy a type of virtual field trip.

      

We will now use the final product as a non-fiction resource for further learning.  In addition to this, we will take a moment to look over the layout choices made by each classroom and discuss how it enhanced the content…or what could have been improved.  I look forward to seeing how kids engage with the text and the information they are able to bring back to the group–and how will this compare with a region text that was created for them (by a publishing company)… but not by them.

Next year I would love to add some skype interaction with the other classrooms at the end of the project. This would allow us the opportunity to ask questions and get some clarification about things they had written about.  It would also allow us just one more opportunity to see that walls do not need to define our learning–especially now that we have technology resources.  I don’t know that we’ll have time this year with testing season approaching, but I think that interaction would only enhance engagement and understanding!

 

For the Love of Book Creator

Every once in a while you come upon an app that you adore and can’t get enough of…that is my feeling about Book Creator by Red Jumper.  I wouldn’t pay for many apps, but this one…this one…I’d pay a million dollars for.  Lucky for my principal’s budget, it’s only $2.50 (Volume Purchase Price for 20+copies)!  And it is one of only 2 paid apps that our entire school uses.  This is the first in a series of posts that will share about my one true app love…

Here are the basics…

 

I love you book creator, let me count the ways…

First of all, this app is extremely intuitive.  I told my kids (4th grade) to create a book using book creator. The only direction I gave was to use the pictures from our field trip I had stored in google drive…yes, seriously, that was all I said. I never introduced the app, or explained how to use it, or gave specific directions. Yet, every single kiddo was able to produce a fantastic looking book without a single question to me about how to do it.  I love that they could pick it right up and go.  Now, there are so many amazing things you can do that maybe they didn’t know about right away, you can: add links, make pictures clickable links, combine books, etc–but to be able to just pick it up and make something wonderful right off the bat makes it approachable for both students and maybe more importantly, teachers, which is worth its weight in gold!

Secondly, the features…oh how I love all the features!  You can add text, pictures, videos, sound (recordings), draw, and dare I say it…soon to be shapes…all using the + button at the top of the page. The + for adding something…duh, that makes sense (see what I mean about intuitive?!)  You can also adjust features to fit your style by using the circle with the “i” inside while clicked on an object.  This reminded me of he inspector button used in Apple’s pages application, so it also made sense to me. While clicked on an item you can easily change text size and color, you can move objects’ position in the layout (move front/back), add alternative text for photos, change the color of the background of the pages, as well as see grids and guides to hlep your final product look more professional (I find this a great tool to help students understand how important layout of pages is for an overall product).  I’m also excited to see new features that are coming along soon.  I have yet to experience the new shapes item, I hear they are bringing into the app during the newest update, but if its anything like the rest of the app…it’s sure to be great, and easy to use.

Next, you can share these books in a variety of ways.  Our favorite is to store the books as .epubs in Google Drive. This way our friends in class can open them and add them to their iBooks bookshelf to read over and over!  But maybe you want to share with someone who doesn’t have access to an ebook reader.  In this case you can save as PDFs which gives you the option to print out the pages.  You will lose the interactivity of the books (one of the best parts) when you share this way, but honestly sometimes for sharing purposes you just have to trade functionality for convenience.  The same is true when you save as a video.  Videos will allow you to hear the recordings, but again you will lose a lot of the interactive pieces.  Having variety for ways to share is a great plus though, since you can use whatever suits your needs!

Lastly, and probably my most favorite–you can combine books, which allows you to take pages from various students (even if they create on different iPads) and combine them into one book.  We’ve used this for Kinder class books where every student creates one page and then combined them to make a class book.  In the upper grades we’ve had students complete everything from single pages, to chapters of a book, and then combined them to create a single class, or group, book (a great tool for group projects1)  We can then share these books, so that everyone can enjoy the final products.  My favorite project has brought several classrooms together to create a shared book…more on that in a different post!

As you can probably tell, from me droning on and on, and because I’ll come right out and shout it from the rooftops,  “I adore this app!”  The possibilities are endless. And I’m sure you’ll hear a lot about all the ways I/we use it in the upcoming weeks.  I hope in the meantime you’ll explore Book Creator using the free app (for one free book) and that you come to love it, like I have!