Book Creator: The New Digital Storyteller

Our Kindy kids have a lot of ideas for stories and they (even with some developmental limitations) always try to put their creative ideas on paper. These limitations may be a lack of fine motor skills that would enable them to write and draw legibly, a shorter attention span that might mean a book may be “done” without being finished at all, or being able to sound out a phoneme in a word, but not all phonemes. So writing in Kindergarten, depending on the kid, and on the time of the year, can look like this…

This story is a play on the book, Children Make Terrible Pets. Instead of kids being terrible pets, the students turned it the other way around where Lucy the Bear makes a terrible pet. It is usual for this age to have a lack of spacing between words and to spell words based on the first and last phoneme.

Now Kindy teachers have developed a superpower that can decipher this seemingly child-developed Morse code into what the student actually means. But what about parents who want to read their kids’ works? What about proud grandparents in their home countries who want updates on their how their grandkids are doing in school? If they do get access to the kid’s work, it might be difficult to understand that “TRABUL” really means terrible.

This is where the app Book Creator comes in. Kindergarteners already have strong oral skills and they can verbally tell their stories without much guidance. With Book Creator, kids can take pictures of their written and illustrated books and turn them into e-books. The app is a very simple digital book-making tool that encourages kids to tell their stories by using their own pictures, drawings, audio and video. The great thing about this is they can be saved and opened as an iBook on the iPad or could be uploaded as a video on the kids’ blogs. The app ties well with how students are using their blogs to reflect on and show their learning. It’s a great tool since not all kids are up to taking videos of themselves telling their stories, but majority of them are more than willing to read aloud their stories and they love seeing their books come alive on their blogs.

This is a short YouTube tutorial that shows the basics of Book Creator:

And this shows how the finished books would look on our kids’ blogs…

Amazing, right? Granny halfway across the world would surely be showing this to her family and friends.