Friday, June 8, 2012

Book Creation Apps

I've spent months checking out different book creation apps for my students to use to create their ePubs.  I've downloaded free apps and purchased one copy each of quite a few to evaluate them to see which would work best for my ELL students.  I had been getting a bit stressed since we're getting down to the wire to complete these ePubs before the end of the school year.  I want all the students to be able to proudly show off their completed work.
Let me share some of the apps I've considered:
Pages
Pages is a great word processing app, but you can't create an ePub from it yet.  You can only create ePubs from Pages on a Mac computer.
Demibooks Composer
myMemoir
StoryKit
Creative Book Builder
Book Creator 
I've decided to use Book Creator because it will allow the students to import their previously-created audio clips from iTunes and their photos in their iPhoto Library.  It's also very simple to use and gives students the ability to be creative with fonts and colors.

Students have been asked to bring photos from home which we've scanned and they've also taken some photos with the iPads.  Then the photos are imported into iPhoto and put into the folder I created matching the iPad assigned to that particular student.  Each time I sync the iPads, the scanned photos are transferred and ready for the students to use in their books.

They've already uploaded all their audio clips from iTalk into Dropbox and from there they can import them into Book Creator.  It turns out that they can record directly with Book Creator which is great, but they had already created all their audio files as we practiced improving their reading fluency.

Students should be done next week, and then we'll convert their stories into ePubs!

The students are so excited about seeing their ePubs and sharing it with their family and friends.