One of the most powerful apps in education is Book Creator.  It is a paid app, however, at £4.99 it is truly worth it.  From sharing learning, to creating books and comics, to making videos and supporting children with ASN/EAL; book creator truly is the tool for the job.

Here is a quick PowerPoint presentation about how to create, read and share books in Book Creator:

Read to Me

Since November 2016 the ‘Read to Me’ tool has been one of the most powerful features (in my opinion) of this fantastic app.  When it was launched, I had a new EAL learner with an ASD who was struggling to settle into the class.  Her language barrier was a huge issue, and her ASD caused great anxiety in the mornings and after break/lunch.  She didn’t want to have to try and speak to anyone as she became very anxious that she wouldn’t understand or be able to respond.

Until the launch of ‘read to me’ on book creator, she had a system where she would come in and read one of her bilingual books or try to use worksheets with pictures to learn new words.  Whilst this worked to an extent, she did find it tricky as she couldn’t ‘hear’/pronounce some of the words.  With the launch of ‘Read to Me’ in book creator, though, I knew that we were on to a winner.  She built her own dictionary on book creator by drawing (with the pen tool) a picture of the word that she was learning, and typed the word that she chose from her worksheets, class work or dictionary.  E.g. if she had the word ‘tree’ she would draw a tree, type the word tree and then move on.  This would have been the same as what she had already been doing on paper, however, she couldn’t easily pronounce the words previously without myself or a member of support staff sitting with her and reading the words, and this was something that made her feel uncomfortable as she didn’t like that the children could hear her learning new words.  With the ‘Read to Me’ function, she was able to put on headphones and listen to all of her words each morning and after break/lunch.

This then became her routine – come into class before the line, get her designated iPad, put on her headphones, listen to the previous words and add new ones.

It worked!

She soon started writing small sentences that she wanted to use in class, like, ‘please may I go to the toilet?’ I remember the class getting so excited the first time she put up her hand and asked a question, and she was so proud.

I know this is a very specific example of a child with many needs, but, there are so many times in learning environments that book creator can be a hugely powerful tool.  I wish that I had the ‘read to me’ function in the year that I taught a non-verbal child, as I imagine it would have transformed the way that he could communicate with me and the other children.

One of my colleagues is currently using book creator with her class and said that the children are very good at using the ‘read to me’ function to check their learning. She noted comments such as “no, that doesn’t make sense” when they hear it being read back to them.

Design and layout

Creativity is a huge aspect of learning, and applications that are fairly static and don’t allow much creativity really don’t engage our learners as much as those that do.  Book creator allows children to design every page as they want; from the background colour, to the positioning and size of text boxes, to adding their own drawings, or inserting media it really is powerful, and children want to create their own books using it – I’m yet to find a child that hasn’t engaged with it.

The design and layout options are really simple to use and navigate between, and are noted in the Presentation at the top of this post.

Sharing

Children can save their work to their iPad’s book store, as a PDF for printing, or even as a video file that could be put onto the school twitter feed, saved to their Glow OneDrive or even emailed home.

Let me know!

Book Creator genuinely does excite me, and I’m looking forward to sharing its potential with my colleagues in a CPD training this week.  If you already use Book Creator, or will be starting to use it, please send me a tweet and let me know how you use it with your learners, as I love being inspired by the Twitter community!

 

I love exit tickets and collecting feedback and data from plenaries.  What I didn’t love was the sheer volume of paper / photocopying that I used to use to do them.  Snap assessments to see how well my class had understood a topic, exit ticket post-its to give quick feedback about a lesson, plenaries to gauge understanding – SO MUCH PAPER!  Sure, there are ways to gather the same information without using loads of paper – thumbs for feedback for starters – but often I can’t track changes in understanding over a period of time for more than just a handful of children as it requires remembering who said what.

Fortunately, there are better ways to do these that require no paper (apart from initially printing plickers cards as you’ll see later), and better still, these methods save time as there is no marking involved – the computer collates the responses and data for you.

With such a win-win situation, I do wonder why more classes don’t use them.  Sure, for some of the ways suggested below you require multiple devices (sometimes one per child) and this can be tricky if not impossible to achieve; however, other ways require nothing more than one device which can be as simple as the teacher’s own phone!

Plickers

Despite being new to Plickers myself, it is definitely the app that I want to start with when looking at fantastic ways to go paperless when using exit tickets or giving plenaries.  It does even work for assessments.  Truthfully, their own description on their website goes a long way to explaining what Plickers is all about.  There is also a great video by EdTech Tidbits that explains about how to set up and use plickers (although, I do take exception to the ‘throwing away the cards’ comment after each use).

One of the things that I like most about Plickers, aside from the fact that you need only use a mobile phone to gather data, or a phone plus a device connected to a Smart Board if you are wanting the children to see a graph of responses, is the fact that it is a ‘safe’ learning environment.  Unless you specifically ask it to reveal student answers, the children can’t easily tell what their peers have answered.  This really minimises copying and allows the children to feel more ‘safe’ about showing an answer – they know that they won’t be judged.  Indeed, this is feedback that I have received from some of my current pupils.

I now use Plickers on an almost daily basis.  As I am currently covering Digital Literacy in NCCT, my set of Plickers cards live in the ICT suite, and all eleven of my classes have been set up to use plickers through my account.  This means that each child has a ‘number’ which is linked to one of the cards (all of the cards are the same for each class, so card 1 is the same as card 1 for any other class across the world).  My children have memorised their ‘number’ to make handing out the cards simple and quick when needed.  If I still had my own card though, I would definitely print and laminate the student cards at the beginning of the year and have the children keep them in their trays for quick access.

Normally I use plickers as a quick feedback tool – either for my own reflection on a lesson, or to very quickly gauge how well the children have understood concepts within their lesson.  More recently though, I have actually used Plickers in place of a PowerPoint when teaching about Internet Safety: the children were given questions to answer, after each of which we discussed all of the answers and worked together to come to an agreement about what the ‘correct answer’ was before revealing it.  I found this very powerful as it really engaged critical thinking and enabled children to argue their own responses.  I tweeted about this lesson here if you’d like to see more.

Data from your class’ responses is saved to your profile so that you can access it at any time, and after using the data for its purpose, or taking note of it, it is very simple to clear.

Kahoot

Truly one of my, and my class’, favourite tools.  Furthermore, with the iPad rollout across Glasgow City Council and similar initiatives for 1-1 device access within schools, this will almost certainly become a tool used on an almost daily basis by many classes.  Powerful and easy to use, this does require children to have their own devices in order to take part in quizzes / assessments etc, however, it can easily be done that children are timetabled to access a smaller number of devices and work their way through the assessment/quiz etc in a more flexible time period.

Kahoot offer a wide range of resources and videos to help you get started – their best page is here.  They also free development resources and a free Kahoot certification course, for staff to familiarise themselves better with the power of Kahoot.

To sign up (for free) and create your own resources, go to: create.kahoot.it
For students to play your quizzes / assessments, they can either go to kahoot.it on any device, or download the app, again for free, on any smartphone / tablet.

Microsoft/Google Forms

Microsoft Forms and Google Forms are exceptionally powerful and yet seldom used in the classrooms.  Many schools have started using forms as a quick way to gather results of surveys, for example the annual HGIOS survey for staff, parents and students mainly due to the fact that it saves time as no-one has to sit and sift through hundreds of forms in order to collate responses – the computer does it for you and gives you instantaneous feedback.  This is great as it does save vast amounts of paper, however, why have we not started looking at their potential for class assessments.  I won’t write much about this here, as I do plan on doing a blog about using Microsoft and Google forms in schools later this year; however, both tools are available through Glow and I would strongly urge you to look at them to see their full potential.

Other

There are many other applications, tools and websites out there that give you as much power and flexibility as the above, however not all of them are free.  Many educators will swear by Socrative, which is indeed a fantastic tool, however I have found that the above are just as powerful and what’s more, they’re completely free.  Socrative is free to use with one class, but as I have multiple classes it would cost me to use which is why I don’t – however, that’s not to say that it’s not worth it.

As with all tools, the important thing is to find one that works for you and in your setting.  I think the tool that will work in pretty much every setting is Plickers and if this blog has given you any inspiration this week, I hope that it is to use Plickers more.

Get in touch

As always, I welcome feedback on the blog and suggestions for future posts.  It would also be great to see what you’re doing in your classes, so do get in touch on twitter @mrfeistsclass and let me know what your class is up to.

Next week’s blog is all about using ICT in a setting where there is limited access to ICT.  Having taught in a setting with no ICT suite or device access, and only 1-2 computers per class – for a number of years at the start of my career, I know how frustrating it can be, so hopefully my blog will give you ideas about how to use the resources effectively in such a setting.

 

 

Have a great week,

Donald