I scanned the responses to see if there were any duplicates and informed the educators so that they could resubmit another idea. To begin organizing the content for each of these two books, I created a Google Form for potential contributors to submit their proposals. I reached out to friends of mine to ask them to work on specific sections. I also specifically invited school librarians in my county to contribute to "The Digital Librarian's Survival Toolkit" through our list serv. To find my co-authors, in May I began posting in my Hacking School Libraries Facebook group, as well as other Facebook groups related to education, libraries, and technology. Many of our contributors had never used Book Creator before and now are advocating to use it in their districts. I wanted to use a tool that was user-friendly, flexible, and collaborative. I chose Book Creator over Google Slides because it has that experience of turning pages, and is also very easy to insert and directly record audio and video. In fact, many contributors use these ebooks as springboards to collaborative conversations with their colleagues. As a school librarian, I believe that these ebooks are powerful tools for advocacy. Since I am a published author, I wanted others to feel the same exhiliaration of being published without being intimidated by writing an entire book on their own. I believe that the success of these two books "The Epic Ebook of Web Tools & Apps" and "The Digital Librarian's Survival Toolkit" is because they were the result of collaborative efforts from a variety of educators all around the world. I also realized that I needed to crowdsource this project in the interest of time, and that I couldn't do it alone.
I prefer printed books over digital ones, but I knew that in order for a guide to be practical it needed to contain multimedia elements including videos, audio, images, and text. I didn't want to spend valuable time searching for a publisher, writing a manuscript, and waiting for a book to be printed.
My priority was to support the teachers in my district, and with 3 young children at home remote learning, it was a challenge. Later on in the spring, I began thinking about writing my own book about remote learning strategies and best practices but I decided not to. Each book includes text and videos, and were received very well. So I created 3 leveled books for Flipgrid so teachers could "level up" or "level down" as they felt comfortable. Webinars are wonderful, but they can be boring for more advanced users to wait for beginners to "catch up" and it can be frustrating for beginners who feel rushed.
GO EPIC BOOKS PROFESSIONAL
Also at this time I began exploring ways to deliver professional development to teachers.
This ebook was translated into Spanish by a native speaking friend of mine, with my audio spoken in Spanish. I included a STEM project for the students to complete, as well as discussion questions, and a link to Flipgrid where students could reflect on their experience. I first created a " You Can Write a How-To Book" ebook that explained my journey of writing makerspace STEM books for Scholastic. When we first moved to remote learning in March I was trying to find a way to support teachers all over the world. Moving to remote learning and thinking collaboratively
GO EPIC BOOKS HOW TO
In fact, I demonstrated to our Public Information Officer and her secretary how to use Book Creator to celebrate our retiree and silver anniversary honorees! Through this presentation I learned even more about the magic of Book Creator, and have been assisting our high school faculty to develop ways to integrate this tool into their assessments. My colleagues and I, along with the district assistive technology professional and the elementary technology support specialist, were asked to present to the school board on the Universal Design for Learning technologies that we were using in our district to support all learners. Book Creator was used extensively in our elementary schools and, late last winter, our district purchased a subscription for all teachers K-12. In my new role as an edtech specialist librarian in a high school setting, I revisited Book Creator as a web tool for our Chromebooks. That was at least 5 years ago, and I didn't realize the potential of using Book Creator. When I was a middle school librarian I offered Book Creator as a digital making option in our makerspace. I first learned about Book Creator as an iPad app.
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