iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

book creator

Book Creator Now Lets You Publish With One Tap

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Book Creator is a fantastic and popular iPad app for creating multimedia ebooks. In fact, more than 1,000,000 stories are created with the app every month. For years the only way to share the stories that students create was to turn their books into videos, publish them as PDFs, or publish them as ePub documents. All were fine options, but they required some extra steps in order for parents to see the books that their children made in your classroom. Last Friday that changed when Book Creator introduced a new option to publish Book Creator books online.

Book Creator books can now be published for easy online viewing. Publishing online essentially creates a webpage that you can share with your students’ parents so that they can view their students’ work on their tablets, phones, or laptops. It is important to note that students can’t publish their books independently. You, the teacher, have to publish the books on your students’ behalf from your Book Creator teacher account. Dan Kemp, the founder of Book Creator, is taking student privacy seriously and has published a statement about how Book Creator tries to protect students’ privacy.

Eventually, there will be a cost associated with publishing Book Creator books online. For now, you can publish ten books for free. Directions for publishing online can be found here.

Book Creator for iPad is 50% Off This Week

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book_creatorThe popular Book Creator iPad app turns five years old this week. To celebrate its birthday the developers are discounting the app by 50% all week (September 19 – September 25, 2016). The discount even applies to those using the volume purchasing program.

Book Creator allows anyone to create their own books using images, text, videos, drawings, and audio recordings. You can arrange your book in three different formats; portrait, square, or landscape. Each page in your book can include pictures and videos from your iPad’s camera roll and or from your iTunes library. In addition to the pictures and videos you can include as much as text as you can fit on each page. In fact, if you just want to have text on a page you can do that. If you would like to narrate your book you can tap the record button to add your voice to each page of your book. Every page in your book can have a custom color scheme.

For those who want to make multimedia comics, Book Creator is a great choice. Comic templates including comic fonts, speech bubbles, and characters can be used in Book Creator books.

Book Creator allows you to export your books to ePub format. The exported file can be opened and read in the Chrome web browser using the free Readium browser extension. This is a great option as it allows a parent who doesn’t have an iPad at home to view his or her child’s work at home.

I’m sure this post reads like an advertisement for Book Creator. I don’t have any business affiliation with the Book Creator developers. I shared the news just because I think it’s a great app and it’s available at a great price right now. 

A Comic Creation Contest for Kids

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Last month comic templates were added to the popular Book Creator iPad app. Book Creator is hosting a contest to showcase those new templates. The contest is open to students under the age of 13. To enter students have to create a comic story by using the templates in the Book Creator iPad app. The winner will receive an iPad Pro and two runners-up will receive iPad minis.

The rules of the contest are quite complex so make sure you read them all before your students begin. One of the rules that jumps out is that you cannot have more than three entries from the same school. Therefore, you might need to host your own contest within your school to determine which comics will be entered into the Book Creator contest.

Watch the video embedded below to learn more about the comics creation option in Book Creator.

Create Comics in the Latest Version of Book Creator for iPad

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book_creator The popular Book Creator iPad app received a great update this week. The full version of Book Creator now includes tools for creating comics. The comic creation tools include a large selection of layouts, speech bubbles, drawing tools, stamps, and stickers. You can even include your own pictures in the comics that you create in Book creator. Watch the video embedded below to learn more about the comics creation option in Book Creator.

Book Creator allows you to export your books to ePub format. The exported file can be opened and read in the Chrome web browser using the free Readium browser extension. This is a great option as it allows a parent who doesn’t have an iPad at home to view his or her child’s work at home.

Three iPad Apps for Creating Multimedia eBooks

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One of my favorite things about iPads and the web in general is the ease with which anyone can create a multimedia product. Teachers can create and organize multimedia reference materials for students and students can create multimedia products to show off their ideas. The following three iPad apps allow you and your students to create multimedia ebooks.

story_creatorStory Creator is a free iPad app that makes it easy to create narrated picture books on your iPad. To create a narrated picture book on Story Creator start by inserting a picture as your book’s cover. To create a page just tap the “+” icon and import a picture, draw a picture, type some text, or do all three. After completing one or all three of those previous actions tap the microphone icon to record your narration. After making your recording you can quickly adjust it so that each word of text is highlighted to match the timing of your narration.

storymakerLittle Story Maker is a great little app that adults and children can use to create their own custom books on their iPads. The app provides book templates that you complete with your own images, text, and voice narration. All of the books that you create are stored in your Little Story Maker bookshelf. To create a book in Little Story Maker start by adding a title, add a cover image by selecting from your iPad’s camera roll, then choose a template for your book. On each page you can add an image from your camera roll and type the text for your page. If you want to add narration to your book simply click the “record audio” button after typing your text. Then you can add narration that will play on the page.

book_creatorBook Creator allows anyone to create their own books using images, text, videos, and audio recordings. You can arrange your book in three different formats; portrait, square, or landscape. Each page in your book can include pictures and videos from your iPad’s camera roll and or from your iTunes library. In addition to the pictures and videos you can include as much as text as you can fit on each page. In fact, if you just want to have text on a page you can do that. If you would like to narrate your book you can tap the record button to add your voice to each page of your book. Every page in your book can have a custom color scheme. Your completed Book Creator projects can be sent directly to your iBooks library or shared to a service like Box or Dropbox where they will be available as ePub publications.