EduTech

EduTech: Book Creator makes it easy for students & teachers to create & share interactive ebooks

Chance Miller | May 7 2017 - 9:10 am PT

EduTech is a 9to5Mac weekly series that focuses on technology’s application in education, lower and higher level, both for productivity and enjoyment. If you have suggestions for topics or specific questions you’d like to see answered, feel free to let me know. Catch up on past installments here.

In this week’s installment of EduTech, we’re taking a look at a way to easily and quickly create ebooks, right on iOS. Useful for both teachers and students, this app allows users to create content in a way that’s entertaining, while also practical or learning and engagement.

Read on as we dive deeper into Book Creator for iPad…

Book Creator is an iPad app that allows users to easily create ebooks. Essentially, the app gives users a blank canvas and a set of tools such as text, sound, and more to create an ebook. Inside Book Creator are a variety of different templates for helping the creation process, including templates for instruction manuals, research journals, interactive stories, poetry books, and even comics. These templates allow users to create sophisticated ebooks with just a few simple steps.

Book Creator is useful for both professors and students. This day and age, physical textbooks are starting to become less common as focus shifts towards online resources. Thus, professors could use Book Creator to create an ebook of course material, including outside resources, their own writings, figures, videos, assignments, due dates, and much more.

Many professors, especially in higher-level classes, write their own textbooks and Book Creator would make it incredibly easy to put those textbooks into digital form, allowing them to be easily and regularly updated.

For students, Book Creator is a creativity paradise. Students, either on their own or as instructed by their teacher, could create their own textbook based on material learned in class. This gives students a chance to further enhance their knowledge on a subject, while also allowing them to be creative in how they learn the information.

Inside Book Creator, users can add their own photos, videos, drawings, text, sound, and much more. There’s also built-in support for adding shapes and diagrams.

Add text, choosing from over 50 fonts
Add photos and images from your iPad’s photo library, from the web, or use the iPad’s camera
Resize, rotate and position content as you like with guidelines and snap positioning
Add video and music, and even record your voice
Use the pen tool to draw and annotate your book
Choose from portrait, landscape or square book sizes
Add super powers to your books with comic templates, stickers and styles
A quick tap and you’re reading your book in iBooks!

Once an ebook has been created using Book Creator, it can be shared via a variety of different platforms. For teachers, there’s support for publishing a book directly online, making it available to anyone interested in a subject. There’s also support for sharing via email, AirDrop, iCloud Drive, printing, and more.

Additionally, Book Creator ebooks are created using the ePub format – meaning that they can be published to iBooks and available for years to come.

One interesting aspect of Book Creator is the community. If you head to the company’s website, you’ll see a variety of collaboration books. For instance, there’s “A Global iBook,” which is an ongoing project where schools around the world add to a themed book. Perhaps most interestingly is a book called “Faraway Friends,” which acts as a form of cultural exchange between schools in Chicago and Ireland.

More than anything, Book Creator is incredibly versatile. It allows teachers – higher level and lower level – as well as students of any age to create, view, and share ebooks with peers and colleagues around the world.

Book Creator is available on the App Store for $4.99, but there’s a discount available for schools and educators.