Easy eBooks - Book Creator App

We discovered Book Creator App a couple of months ago and since then it's really catching on as a great option for creating beautiful looking ePub Books. We currently have a few different grades doing projects with this App.

This particular project is a grade 1-2 class who are writing their own books inspired by Eric Carle's Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

The Process

Pictures of puppets: 

The students took photos of their puppets in the pose they wanted. For the most part this was an easy task but we sometimes needed to talk about how to take good pictures using an iPad. We are finding that our students have improved so much with their iPad picture taking skills. As it often does, practice makes almost perfect!

Inserting Pictures: 

The Book Creator App just underwent a fairly major update and it changed the way that pictures can be inserted into books. Previously, we had to take all the pictures in the camera app and then insert them. Now, users can insert them directly from the app by taking pictures on the go. 

We had the students inserting all the pictures into the book first before they entered any voice, or text. I think this strategy helped develop the framework of the book so the students could see how much they had completed and how much was left to do.

 

Entering Text:

We then entered text using our collection of words we had previously written on sheets of paper. These sheets of paper were scattered over the desks and students were encouraged to find the words themselves. Some students required the base sentences written down as a guide.

_____ ______ WHAT DO YOU SEE?

I SEE A _______ LOOKING AT ME.

I wrote these in capital letters as some of our emergent writers had trouble locating letters on keyboard as they are upper case on most keyboards.

 

Recording Voice-Over:

The voice over recording was the most exciting part. Students loved recording their own voice and doing so with expression. Once finished, students listened through their recordings to see if they wanted/needed to edit anything.

Exporting to iTunes/iBooks:

As always, the important when working on iPads is taking the work off the device. Book Creator allows you to share books by opening them in another ePub friendly app such as iBooks or Kobo. The other option for exporting the book is to Send it to iTunes (see image below). This worked best for us as I manage the iPads and it was easy enough to move a copy of the book (PDF and ePub) to a computer. Once off the iPad you can share with other people or put it on the classroom iPad as a reading activity. 

This shows the export window and the options of 'Send to iTunes' or  'Open in Another App'.

Here is an example of a published book in action. Please note: this example was from a kindergarten project using the same App.