There are numerous ways to leverage the educational potential of technology to enhance students engagement and boost their learning, and an important one of them involves engaging students in writing projects that end up in creating books or storybooks.
The idea of creating a book might seem intimidating to some until we learn about the wide array of possibilities offered by technology which makes the whole book writing process a breeze. In this post, I am sharing with you a collection of some of the best apps students can use to easily create and share books.
Students can make books to showcase their learning, tell stories, provide informational content around topics taught in class, write autobiographies, and many more. Creating books does not have to be a tedious and intimidating task.
Plan brainstorming sessions with your students, discuss book ideas, delve into the mechanics of writing, and share with them the resources below or, better yet, use them in class and ask students to provide feedback.
These book making apps will enable students to engage with the act of writing in a distraction free environment where their focus is primarily centered on ideation. More importantly, these apps allow students to add a layer of interactivity to their books thus boosting their media literacy skills. For instance, students can create interactive and dynamic books where they insert multimedia materials such as links, videos, audio recordings, images, and more.
Students will definitely feel proud to share their final product with their peers, school community, and why not with the whole the world by hosting their books on classroom website or blog for everybody to see.
There are many book creation apps out there but I saved you time and did the legwork. I compiled for you the most popular book creation apps in the market, ones that I myself have tried and reviewed at different points in blogging journey.
I divided the list into two collections: the first collection features apps that I believe are ideal for students, young and adults. The apps are easy to use, simple, and with less to no learning curve.
The second collection is for advanced writing projects. Research students (working on their dissertations and theses), teachers, educators, and anyone else interested in taking their writing experience to the next level, will find them really helpful.
1- Book Creator
Book Creator is one of the best apps for making books. You can use it with your students to create different types of ebooks including comic books, photo books, picture books, journals, textbooks, among others. Students can experiment with various forms of multimedia materials. They can, for instance, include videos, images, music, or even record and add their own voice.
Book Creator offers over 50 text fonts and a large library of comic templates, stickers and styles. There is also the option for students to use Book Creator’ s pen tool to draw and annotate their books.
Once the book is completed, students are offered various sharing options including: sharing via email, saving it to a cloud service such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or iCloud Drive; saving the book as a movie file to upload to the web; exporting it in PDF format, transferring it to iTunes and many more. ‘Book Creator books are optimized for easy publishing to the iBooks Store.’
Age: 4+ / Compatibility: iPad / Price: $2.99
2- My Story School eBook Maker
My Story School eBook Maker is another easy to use book maker app to use with students in class. Kids can create interactive storybooks using images, drawings, and stickers. Kids can also record their own voices and add them to every page in the book and when published these recordings are kept intact.
My Story enables kids to turn their book creation experience into a creative expression where they use tools such as paint brushes, pencils, and markers to create and insert beautiful artwork into their books.
Books created through My Story can be shared via the web, email, and social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook. They can also be exported in PDF format, as an image sequence (PNGs), and as a movie (Mp4).
Age: 4+ / Compatibility: iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch / Price: $4.99
3- Social Story Creator
Social Story Creator is a good app for creating and sharing storybooks. Stories created can include text, pictures, and recordings and can be made in any language. Students can turn their stories into PDFs and print to keep paper copies. Social Story Creator also contains a huge library of social stories which is an excellent resource especially for student with special needs.
‘Children with special needs often need more direct instruction of social skills. Teaching social skills to any child may be easier and less stressful when visual supports, like social stories are used. The social stories found in this app explain accurate social information and ensures that your child will know what to expect in different situations.’
Age: 4+ / Compatibility: iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch / Price: Free, offers in-app purchases
For advanced book writing projects, I would highly recommend the following apps:
1- Scrivener
This is my favourite among them all. I have used Scrivener is several of my writing projects including in writing my Master’s thesis. When you first start using Scrivener it will take you sometime till you get the hang of it but once you do you will definitely love it.
Scrivener offers all the tools you need to write your next book or lengthy paper. You can start writing your manuscript in the way you like. Write as many sections as you want and, using the binder sidebar, you can easily navigate sections and even view them as a single text. With a single click, you can select the font of your choice, add footnotes and comments, insert hyperlinks and highlights, add simple bullets and lists, insert images, and many more.
Scrivener is so flexible and versatile. Your manuscript draft does not have to follow a given order. You can write your sections then easily order them later on. Other cool features provided by Scrivener include live word and character counts; dark mode; customizable keyboard row; project-wide research; arrange sections by icons, import text, images, PDFs and media files; supports multitasking split screen mode; copy projects across devices via iTunes and more. Scrivener offers different sharing options including the ability to export to Word, PDF, RTF, or plain text.
Age: 4+ / Compatibility: iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch / Price: $19.99
2- iA Writer
iA Writer is another powerful writing tool that you can use to write long manuscripts and books. Besides the conventional features provided by a word editor, iA Writer also offers a distraction free environment where you can focus on the act of writing only.
In fact, there is a Focus mode which when enabled dims everything surrounding your sentence or paragraph allowing an exclusive focus on your written words. The app also offers an inverted light-on-dark-mode which is perfect for writing day and night.
iA Writer helps prune your writing from superfluous phrases and redundant words. It automatically spots grammatical and semantic anomalies in your text and allows you to remove them with a single click.
You can also embed links, images, tables, and text files in plain text and see them in preview. When your manuscript is ready, you can export to WordPress, HTML, Microsoft Word, or PDF.
Age: 4+ / Compatibility: iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch / Price: $29.99
3- Ulysses
Ulysses and iA Writer have a lot in common in terms of the features the provide. Ulysses provides a distraction-free editor that helps you focus on your writing and editing. The integrated proofreader helps enhance your writing style offering you grammatical and stylistic suggestions for, for instance, punctuation usage, semantics, redundancy, and more.
Everything you write in Ulysses is automatically saved to the app’s library allowing seamless access across different devices. Ulysses offers a number of sharing options including the ability to export your text in PDF format, as Word document, or eBook. You also have the choice to export it in HTML code to use on any web platform.
‘You can even choose between a variety of pre-made formatting styles for all kinds of purposes, or create your own and share it with other users.’ For those of you who blog, Ulysses lets you publish to a number of blogging platforms including WordPress, Medium, Ghost, among others.
Age: 4+ / Compatibility: iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch / Price: Free, offers in-app purchases.
