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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