I Love the Book Creator App!

Have you tried the Book Creator app for motivating your students to write?  I used it last December for students to document our "Elf Adventures" in the classroom, and saw incredible motivation to write from each of my students!  (Whether it was the elf, or the app I do not know, but the two of them together was amazing!)  Book Creator provides a simple way to create beautiful books on your iPad.  Students can even record their voice reading, or add videos.

After students create their book, they send it to iBooks.  The teacher can sync the books with the classroom set of iBooks for the rest of the class to read. How powerful is that?!!  Students will see their book on the bookshelf with other great books!!!  You can even email the book as a PDF which can be viewed on a computer or personal device,  or an ePub book, to be viewed on an iPhone or iPad.  (Just a warning though...If the book has lots of pages with pictures and audio, it might be too large to email.  In that case you can just save it to your Dropbox.)

Here is a link to a short video that pretty much shows you (in less than two minutes) how the app works. 
http://vimeo.com/redjumper/bookcreator

There is help available on the app itself, and it is super easy for the kids to use.  To get support, just go to the "My Books" section on Book Creator, and click on Support.  There are answers to any question you could possibly have.

My 2nd and 3rd graders started using it without any instruction from me.  I actually let them go in and explore the different book creator apps that were loaded on their iPads, and they found that Book Creator was the easiest to use, plus the books they created looked really good.  The app isn't free.  It costs 4.99 in the app store, but it is well worth the cost.

Here are some screen shots from one of my student's books.  I wish you could hear the expression in her voice as she reads!  It is priceless!  Be sure to scroll down to the bottom where I have included some ideas on how to use this powerful app in the classroom!

There are many ways to use Book Creator in the classroom.  Here are a few suggestions:

• Students could create their own textbooks, collaborating as each student contributes a chapter/topic/or theme.
• Students could publish an essay or poetry anthology.
• Older students could create books for younger students.
• Connect curricular subjects with art. Have students create the art for their books, such as the illustrations for books on the life cycle of the butterfly, or animal reports.
• Teachers could create a short book with pictures to introduce a new topic to students, or to activate prior knowledge.

How have you used Book Creator?   If you haven't used it yet, how would you use it in the future?