Thing 33: eBook Creation

So in my Anything Goes Google post I decided to check out How to Create an ebook with Google Slides because I wondered it I could share student work that way.  I would love to post some of the research projects that my students have been creating on my website.  Here is the link to a sample eBook I made with Google Slides.  It explains some of my thinking: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5r5qV7yug_iZ01XNkU1RnF0Y2s/view?usp=sharing

That detour made me explore some other eBook-type options.

I went to 2 BRAND NEW tools to help students display work, reflect which discusses Drive Slides a new extension that makes slides out of the images in a specific folder on your Drive account, as well as Slide Shot which takes screen shots of your computer every minute and makes them into a presentation  I don’t really see myself using either of these tools, however.  It had the bonus of telling me about PhotosForClass.com.  Another CC site to send my students to.  My sixth graders would have loved it for their river project presentations.  I’m not sure that all of the images they included in their Google Slides were ones that they had the rights to use despite my education on the topic.  Does anyone else ever have the problem?

So, in Polly’s eBook Creation post, I realized that I can download my Google Docs as PDFs, too, as well as in ePub format.  I guess I don’t have to get too fancy to make this work.  I didn’t bother to try the ePub format at this point, but I wanted to make sure I could find it later.

I decided to try just converting a Google Doc to PDF.  Here is the link to it that describes what I learned in the process: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5r5qV7yug_ieFF2QUlndHpKTEk/view?usp=sharing

Reading the assignment further brought me to Comics – Great way to combine storyboarding, drawing and writing. Ironically, I was looking into comics yesterday for a lesson with a first grade class.  Since it is the end of the year and we want to do something fun, the teacher wants to students to have her students fill in speech bubbles to make short stories.  I was able to download a few paper templates, but I wondered what was available online that wouldn’t be too hard for the students. 

I decided to try out one I had explored years ago: www.MakeBeliefsComix.com I made this comic without too much trouble:

You can print, save, or email, but the site doesn’t save the comic for you.  You can also choose the number of panels you wish to have.

Then, I went to Read Write Thinks’s Comic Creator.  I usually like this site for its simplicity.  I have used the pamphlet creator with my fourth graders before. The characters are not as nicely drawn, but the site is easier to use.  They say you can only print it, but you could always save as a PDF which I did here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5r5qV7yug_ialhHT0lEOTNwcWs/view?usp=sharing

I went from Thing 33 eBook Creation to Thing 4: Digital Storytelling Tools and then to Thing 5: Presentation Tools because they all seem so related, at least to me.  In Presentation Tools, there was a mention of using Google Slides with a link to Slides Carnival – free templates for Google Slides. There I found a terrific comic tool!  The Crab presentation template which has adorable animals with speech bubbles!  It is perfect for little learners!  We could use it online or even print it out in full page size so they don’t have trouble writing in the small spaces.  Here is a link to the comic I made:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5r5qV7yug_iMm1YMHlOWkxJQ0E/view?usp=sharing

(BTW, I do know how to shorten the URLs, but I also know that my school’s NERIC filter doesn’t allow access to shortened URLs, so I just don’t.)

Slides Carnival’s Crab presentation template also taught me how to add Special Characters into a Google Slide presentation. Specifically, it taught me to add emojis.  This will be very cool for my future lessons! 

The Book Creators for Chromebooks link pretty much confirmed for me that Google Docs is probably the easiest way to go to achieve my goal.  But it was still a very good link to follow.  I am planning to work toward buying the library our own set of Chromebooks.  It is hard to share with the other teachers and still have the equipment to use with all of my classes.