Schools & Districts - Book Creator app (2023)

We've worked alongside educators since 2011 to make sure Book Creator is as easy to use for teachers and students as it possibly can be.

Of all the feedback we get from teachers about Book Creator, the thing we hear the most is that it’s very easy to use.

“With guidance, even students in early elementary school grades can use this app to produce and publish their own simple books or comics with images, videos, and audio. But given the options for adding images and multimedia, even more sophisticated students won't feel limited.”
—Common Sense Education, July 2018

As a simple tool that can enhance any lesson plan or activity, with Book Creator, even those teachers who have little confidence in technology can easily move their existing lessons over to the devices they’ve been supplied with in their classroom.

This gives them the opportunity to include multimedia, graphics, links and content to better engage their students. As a PD tool, Book Creator is excellent for building the confidence of teachers and helping them instantly see the benefits and ease of moving to digital learning.

What’s more the, barrier for entry for students is so low, you can hand the device to students from Kindergarten upwards and not need to spend hours teaching them how to use the app.

Be it students in a classroom each making a page toward a class book, students documenting their learning and sharing their findings with their peers, or collaborating with schools across the globe, Book Creator is the perfect tool to get students working together and learning from each other.

With real-time collaboration, this can also be used for group projects, team-based learning and all class activities.

Many of the apps built for education focus on how to teach students a concept or idea. These are often effective in what they do but proliferate a culture of ‘consumerism’ in technology.

We believe the best educational apps are not prescriptive, but allow freedom—focusing on creativity and problem solving, which is why Book Creator offers a simple blank canvas.

This allows the technology to be a reflection of students’ ideas, effort, creativity, imagination, focus and hard work.

At Book Creator, we believe that when students know they are creating work that will be seen by an audience outside of the classroom (i.e. not just their teacher), they become far more motivated and engaged. This is reflected in teacher feedback - students creating books will often go back and make edits if they realise their work will be published online (you may even noticing them working through recess!).

With a myriad of sharing and publishing options built into Book Creator, we’re putting publishing into the hands of students.

“My students are each creating a resource that will be available for download across the world. This is authentic learning at its best. My students have a voice.”
—Jane Ross, Digital Literacy Coach

The power of Book Creator lies in its simplicity. Teachers and students can take a familiar object – a book – and extend its creative potential as far as their imaginations will allow. Every teacher knows what a book looks like and can immediately generate ideas for how one can fit into their curriculum.

Students can also quickly wrap their minds around the concept of a book – even if digital – and comprehend that it could contain text, drawings, and images.

Extending the idea of a book being a familiar concept, it iss also a medium that offers a more rounded experience.

Asking students to write work up on a word processor or office tool is good for assessment, however they’re limited in functionality and creative scope. With Book Creator you can investigate wider media literacy concepts such as design, formatting, copyright, attribution and publishing safely online.

Book Creator takes the familiar and then slowly stretches what could be possible. A teacher or student might begin with a static book or comic book, creating content that contains text, drawing, and images. Maybe they add audio narration as a next step.

Then, as they become more confident, they shift from working with static to dynamic content: inserting videos created in other apps, linking to content within the pages of a book or on the web, and really rethinking the concept of what it means to be a book.

What starts as a familiar paradigm then opens up a new world of possibility as teachers and students focus on creativity instead of technology. Let the #AppSmashing commence!

Book Creator is perfect as a digital tool for recording learning and demonstrating understanding. Students can incorporate work from other apps, taking time to reflect on their process, or what they’d do differently, or seek feedback from their teacher or peers.

Teachers can even combine work from students in the class to create a portfolio to showcase learning.

One way to use Book Creator is for teachers to create their own content for students to engage with.

Not only that, but by copying and tweaking the templates they’ve created, teachers can design differentiated learning experiences for students of all abilities. Or, they can set different assignments per student based on their learning needs.

Building on the idea of using Book Creator for personalised learning, when you combine this with the ease of use of the app, alongside the amazing accessibility features built into modern tech devices, you can see why Book Creator is becoming increasingly popular in special education.

We have numerous case studies demonstrating how Book Creator has transformed learning for students with a range of special needs.

See also this independent accessibility report from Wendy Torres, Senior Instructional Technologist at Coppin State University.

With the difficult task of managing school budgets, you need to know that you are getting value for money from every purchase you commit to. We strongly believe that Book Creator offers excellent value, for two main reasons.

1. The open-ended nature of Book Creator means that you don’t necessarily need a dedicated science app, portfolio tool or special needs software. With a little creativity Book Creator can become all of these things and more. We’ve seen students author their own textbooks, create digital portfolios, write non-linear fiction, and publish well cited research journals all within one app.
2. Our price point. We consulted widely before setting a subscription price for Book Creator, making sure that teachers were happy with the value they would get. The price we have set is enough to cover our costs and maintain a small team that can keep innovating and improving the app. Moreover, we are fully committed to educators — we have not taken investment and aren’t accountable to outside shareholders.

There may be a number of reasons why a particular student isn’t engaged in writing. Perhaps they have difficulty expressing ideas using words; maybe English isn’t their first language, maybe they just aren’t motivated to write.

By offering student voice and choice, Book Creator helps move students on in their ability to communicate. They can record their voice instead of typing (either as an audio button or direct speech to text). They can have their writing read back to them in Book Creator’s Read to Me mode.

They can use different fonts and styles to communicate their meaning (including the ‘Open Dyslexic’ font for ease of reading). They can include media and high quality design to bring their story to life.

Not to mention the motivating factor of creating a published book that can be read the world over.

Book Creator has been designed as a super-intuitive, friendly application that requires very little training or onboarding for teachers or students.

After a quick walk through guide, we guarantee that almost any teacher will be confident to use Book Creator.

We have a wealth of resources available to inspire ideas and provide hints, tips and advice from our huge Book Creator community of teachers.

If you are a district or school that’s looking for help with PD, we also have a whole package aimed at supporting every teacher in getting the most out of the application.

Once signed into the app, teachers can access our self-paced training course, which offers the chance to become accredited with a Book Creator Certified Author badge.

This course has proven to be a popular way to get to grips with the basics of Book Creator and could even form part of your plan to assign PDand deliver renewal credits to staff.

Dive deeper

Explore how Book Creator can help teach specific curriculum areas