Book Creator The World is My Audience

Book Creator The World is My Audience By Jon Smith Date: December 4, 2020

instruction, literacy & inclusion

T he World is My Audience

Like every good story, mine has a start. It starts at an inner city school in Canton, Ohio, where I was the teacher to a class of special education students. If you looked at a picture of them, you’d think they were hap- py children. You’d be wrong. They were 5th graders and they had big problems. They didn’t care about me. They didn’t care about their friends. They didn’t care about school. But the one thing that really surprised me was their hatred for writing. They really hated writing. At first this hatred confused me, until I came to a realization myself. I realized that I hated writing too! Even as an adult, I didn’t like to write. So I figured, if I could help myself—perhaps I could help them too. Over the next few weeks I tried a myriad of different writing prompts to encourage them. Guess what? None of them worked! Instead of the traditional writing prompts, I tried to think out- side the box. I unleashed a writing prompt about the day in the life of a dog. If normal wouldn’t work, maybe gross would? “Hey kids. Today we are going to write about the day in the life of a dog.” The kids weren’t impressed. “It’s going to be fun. You know what dogs do. Pretend to be them. You wake up. You lick your butt. What happens next?” You could hear the kids snickering in the background. This wasn’t working either. I needed something different. The next day I went to my students with another prompt, this time, about pizza. I figured if they wouldn’t be swayed by gross things, maybe I could convince them to write about food.

Who doesn’t like food? I tried to get the students to write about pizza since it was National Pizza Day. I asked them to tell me about their favorite pizza, favorite kinds, favorite crusts, favor- ite toppings, favorite brands and more. And… nothing. Still no response. At this point, I was about done. I felt like a boxer who had been punched in the face for 12 rounds. I felt defeated. I realized teaching might not be for me and I began plotting my exit from education. As I was thinking about writing my resignation letter, something happened. I remembered what all good teachers re- member. I remembered the teacher store in town. I hopped in my car and drove as fast as the speed limit would allow. I arrived at the store, and there it was in the back left cor- ner, ironically, next to the headache medicine. It was the holy grail of writing. This book had 730 journal prompts in it. That was two for every day of the year! I was so excited that I ran to school the next morning with the journal book in hand. I shared the prompts with my students and guess what? They hated all of them. THEY HATED ALL OF THEM! After trying every single writing prompt in the book, I final- ly realized I was looking at things wrong. It wasn’t about the prompt, it was about the execution. Many months of thinking helped me come to three conclusions as to why kids hate writ- ing… or school, for that matter. 1. AUDIENCE OF ONE For the most part, students do work and when they are done, they turn it into you, the teacher—the audience of one. Some-

JON SMITH (@theipodteacher) is the Teacher Success Manager at Book Creator. Drawing on 19 years as a special education teacher and technology integration specialist, Jon’s role is to help teachers get the most out of Book Creator, through webinars, articles, PD and other adventures. Jon is a husband, father of 3, loves golf, and is a certified auto detailer.

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times they will take the work home and put it on the refrigerator and they have an audience of three or four but that’s it. But think about it - many of the students we work with these days have a global following from an early age, online, through social media. So an audience of one is not OK with them, be- cause they have grown up in a world of sharing, commenting and global relationships. 2. COLLABORATION I also realized that students seldom collaborate with each other in school. It’s the year 2020 and we are still telling students to work independently, to not talk, to not share and to keep their eyes on their own papers. They hate this. If you don’t believe me look at the number of videos on YouTube. Kids work together all the time. 3. LEGACY I also realized that my students weren’t contributing to the benefit of anyone else. All of their work was being thrown in a trash can. Nobody was seeing it. Nobody cared. Where was the work that would be left behind to benefit others? Other than the gum under the desk, nothing was being left behind for others. It was a big revelation to me to view the problem through these new lenses. The only problem was, I still didn’t really have a solution. I was looking for a tool that could help me wrap all of this up (a big ask, I know). Luckily for me technology in edu- cation has come on in leaps and bounds in the past decade or so, and I came across an app I hadn’t used before - Book Creator. Book Creator was launched on iPads in 2011, ostensibly not as an educational app but as a tool for self-publishing authors (although the UK-based developers soon realised they had an education app when teachers started using it from day one of launch). I remember searching the Apple App Store for “writing tools” and coming across Book Creator. I bought the full version with my own money for $3.99 (as my school wouldn’t buy it for me). I fell in love with the app instantly - I found it incredibly so easy to use, and it opened my eyes to the idea that anyone could be an author. So I was full of enthusiasm as I went back to my class with my new idea. And… I was greeted with the same moans and groans as usual. “You want us to do what? Doesn’t that involve writing? No way.” I looked at my students and told them, “Today is going to be different. Yes, it’s going to be different because we are going to write and publish a book.” The kids looked at me with confusion in their eyes. “Why would we want to write a book and publish it?”, they wondered. “I don’t want to read your writing anymore”, I said. “Your writ- ing is terrible!” (Gasps)

“I want everyone in the world to see how bad your writing is!” You could say my students were a little shocked. But then, a strange and magical thing happened. One student piped up: “But if we’re going to publish a book for the world to read, shouldn’t we make it good?” More ideas and questions followed, and the excitement in the room was palpable. I explained that they were going to write a book for a global audience and that people would leave feedback and comments and that people would love it. “What are we going to write about?” I didn’t care. I just wanted them to write. “How long will this take?”

I didn’t care. I just wanted them to write. “How much money are we going to make.”

None. The entire book would be given away for free. It’s not about the money. It’s about the legacy. It’s about the students writing and contributing to someone other than themselves. We began the writing process like any other assignment. We discussed character, setting, plot and more. We developed an idea for the story. We talked about adding audio, video, photos, text and more to our story. Engagement increased. Time on task increased and the energy in the classroom changed to some- thing you can normally only dream of. After about two weeks my students had a story. We published it and waited for the downloads to happen. After the first day, we had 16 downloads of our book. 16! That was amazing and the students were thrilled. Each day we added more and more downloads. The kids desperately wanted to write more books. Within three months we had written and published three eb- ooks on Apple’s Books store. We were graphing the downloads in the hall on chart paper, estimating how many downloads we would have by the end of the year and planning our next books. Comments from all over the globe came pouring in and it meant a great deal to the students. For the first time in their lives, they had a real, authentic audience for their work rather than a teach- er who was paid to give feedback. By the time I left that role, my class (and some other classes I had introduced the concept to) had published 160 books, which have been downloaded more than 60,000 times! My students were published authors, for sure. A NEW CHAPTER In 2018, I was approached by Book Creator to join their team as the Teacher Success Manager. I now get to teach others about Book Creator all day long, which I love! From that perspective, let me tell you about how effective Book Creator can be as an assistive learning tool. You’ll no doubt know already about Universal Design for Learning. As educators, we understand that students enter our classrooms each day with a wide range of skills, interests, needs and learning styles. For me, it’s about removing barriers and dif-

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A student uses a stylus to draw in their book in Book Creator.

Pam explained to me that she had a group of 4th grade autistic boys that needed some serious motivating and help. They weren’t interested in doing any kind of work at all and she thought making videos would help. I asked her what they were struggling with and she mentioned social skills in particular. Fresh from my experience in Canton, I was looking for another group of guinea pigs and this was the perfect opportunity for me to try Book Creator out with a group of students that weren’t my own. Pam explained to me this was a tough group of kids. She gave me a look of consternation when I explained that rather than making movies, we were going to write books. When I told her that not only were we going to write a book but that we were also going to publish this book for the entire world to download, she looked at me like I was on drugs! I began meeting with her and her students once a week. I ex- plained to the students that they would soon be globally pub- lished authors, and you know what? They were so excited about this, it was contagious. We began using the Book Creator app to make videos of inap- propriate social skills interactions (this wasn’t difficult because this is what they did on a daily basis). Countered to that, we also made videos of the correct interactions, which was a great learn- ing opportunity for the kids. We added their stories, information and author biographies. The students also realized they could record their voices using the app and they had great fun doing this, particularly for those kids who were normally reticent to speak in front of others. This was a safe space to express their voice. Then, being able to add

ferentiating the learning experience to suit the child. Book Creator is open-ended and beautifully simple to use, so we can provide learners with relevant content, customized to them and with various supporting options to make that content accessible. What’s more, the multimodal tools (text, images, au- dio, video, shapes, drawing etc.) and supports available within the app make lessons accessible while building in student voice and choice. Kids can create no matter what their learning style is. Here are just some of the hundreds of accessibility options within Book Creator:

• Speech to text • Text to speech • Closed captioning (for audio and video)

• Keyboard navigation • Open Dyslexic font

• Alt text support for images • Multiple language support • Spell check and predictive text • Switch access support (for applicable devices, such as an iPad) The team at Book Creator is dedicated to making accessibility a core design feature. Even this year they added 230+ accessibil- ity improvements. I love that. Now, let me tell you the story of when I switched jobs and joined Alliance City Schools, as their Technology Integration Specialist. Things were going smoothly until one day when I met Pam, a speech and language pathologist for one of the elemen- tary schools in Alliance.

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Perhaps even more so now that many schools are facing remote learning environments. Students need to share. If they can’t share then you should share for them. We all have a story to tell and getting that story out to others is powerful, and incredibly motivating for students. I want to end this article with a favorite quote of mine from the educator, Rushton Hurley. “When children create for the world, they make it good. When children only create for their teachers, they make it good enough.” Well, guess what? Good enough ain’t good enough anymore. Let’s get that work off of the refrigerator at home and get it onto everyone’s refrigerator! Happy book making. PRODUCT INFORMATION Book Creator is an easy-to-use tool for making multimedia digital books in any subject area, from primary upwards. Create: combine text, audio, video, drawings, photos and appsmash other content!

Real-time collaboration - https://player.vimeo.com/video/272330586?autoplay=1

photos of themselves was the icing on the cake! After a month of work, the book was ready and we published it on the Apple Books store. The downloads started flying in and this is where the real transformation occurred. The students were so excited about the downloads. They put a map in the hall and began to chart which countries had downloaded their book. This seems like such a small thing but to these students it was the world (and from the teacher’s perspective— how about that, not only were they improving their literacy but now they were focusing on math too!). These students who were afraid of talking to others, had few friends and were thought of as outcasts soon became the stars of the school. The students were talking to kids in the hall explaining why there was a red pin in Japan and Norway and Canada. One stu- dent’s parent, who never came to any IEP meetings, showed up for the first time. She was so excited to see what her son had done that she came to her first meeting at the school in four years. The students couldn’t stop writing and wanted to make more and more books. They had so much fun and learned so much while using this app that they wanted to write a whole series of books. In the end, they wrote and published three books in the social skills series. After experiencing the excitement and engagement that has happened over the last 8 years of making books with students, I’ve realized a few things. Students need to be making things. They need to create their learning. They can’t just sit back and let “education” happen to them. They need to be active participants who create wonderful things. Do you agree? Students need to collaborate with each other. They like it. They need it. They crave it. We need to provide students with the opportunities to work together in and out of the classroom.

Read: have your book read to you in multiple languages, with word highlighting and page turning.

Publish: share your book online, download as an ePub file or print it as a PDF. With over 2 million books made every month by teachers and students across the world, Book Creator can bring creativity to your classroom, help engage reluctant writers, and allow stu- dents to demonstrate their understanding. Teachers can get started for free by creating an account at app.bookcreator.com, which will give them 1 library and 40 books at no cost. Additional books, libraries and other features can be purchased with a monthly or annual subscription (start- ing at $10 per month). Book Creator online works on Chromebooks, laptops, PCs and most tablets. There is also a standalone iPad app available for $2.99 . Find out more at bookcreator.com.

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