Mrs. Kozera's Learning Notes

• For this assignment I wanted to take a physical product I have produced and use my enhanced technology skills to convert it to a digital version.

• Throughout the course I've been seeing ads and links to a web software called "Book Creator" that peaked my interest so I decided to take a personal story I wrote for a student this week and create a digital version.

• I have created many social stories for students over the last several years and this is the process I typically follow:

Mrs. Kozera's Learning Notes Continued

• Although there are many benifits to making physical books for students; it is time consuming, uses multiple resources (printer, laminator, laminating sheets, paper and rings) and requires support for students who are unable to read on their own.

• Getting started with Book Creator was very straightforward. I was able to use my Google Account to create a Book Creator account at https://bookcreator.com/. The advantage to linking your google account is that when you are looking to upload pictures you have easy access to items in your google drive.

• Here are the basic steps I followed to create my book:

Mrs. Kozera's Learning Notes Continued

• There are more steps involved with publishing a digital book but many of these are very quick for people who are computer savy. In addition, a digital book can be shared to multiple devices and in various formats which makes it a much more versatile product than one printed version.

• Bonus for those who wish to produce a printed copy is that you can share the book to a printer and follow the same steps as I outlined above for laminating and assembling a flip book.

• One of my favourite aspects of creating a digital book is that my students will have increaesd independence when accessing their stories. They will be able to flip back and forth through the book at their own pace, listen to the story being read to them by the computer voice and/or click on my voice memos that have been added to each page.

• There are several additional options people can access when reading your book online. These include:

  • • • • Side by side or single page view

        • Full screen viewing

        • You can pick the voice of the person reading the text

        • Have the computer read to you (or just flip through on your own)

        • Highlight words

        • Play multimedia

        • Turn pages automatically

        • Change the speed

• Limitations I discovered when creating this product were the ability to have my voice narrating via the play button and you can't preset the voice that reads your story when people click "read to me".

• In the beginning I thought that the size/colour/font of text was not editable but upon furthur investigation I discovered that double clicking on the text itself opens up the menu to change these options.

• Overall this has been an amazing learning expericence and has given me experience with a product that I can envision using for a variety of purposes with my students. Not only is it easy to create simple stories; it is also a very straightforward program that can be used by my tech savy students to create their own materials with ease!

Thank you Book Creator for making a user friendly product that is free to use online!