Ideas for starting the new school year

Teach your first lesson with Book Creator

This year we released our ‘Teach Your First Lesson pack’, which includes five lesson plans and student templates for different age ranges, along with a teacher guide.

These templates are ready to remix and use in class straight away to introduce Book Creator to students.

Here's what's included:

• 'Teach Your First Lesson' book with lesson plans for each template
• Kindergarten and Grade 1-2 templates with video instructions for kids
• Templates for grades 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12 all include audio tooltips

Learn more and get the templates here.

Capturing student work with digital portfolios

One of the great ways you can use Book Creator is to set up a portfolio for students at the start of the year, to capture their progress. Doing this at the start of the year will save you a lot of effort later on!

You have a few options to consider when thinking about how to set up for creating portfolios. Depending on how many libraries you have in your Book Creator account, you could consider:

• 1 library per student
• 1 book per student
• 1 section in a book per student

You might also want to use this remixable digital portfolio template to give you a big headstart!

Configuring your libraries

Remember, if you're on the free plan, you'll only have 1 library so you'll need to be strategic about how you manage the 40 books allocation. But if you or your school has paid for a subscription, you'll have unlimited libraries on the 1,000 book plan.

So, at the start of the year, decide how you want to configure your libraries. You might set up a class library, or divide libraries into different subjects or grades, or create a library for a specific project.

Remember your My Books library allocation is separate, so use that for your draft books or other personal work.

See more: Housekeeping for the new year

Setting up collaboration

Speaking of collaboration, the power of Book Creator really comes alive when students work together.

If you're on a paid plan, you have access to real-time collaboration - just turn on the setting in your library. You could partner up students, or have the whole class working on one book. (Tip: that's also a good time to highlight good digital citizenship and why you don't delete other people's work!).

Don't forget to take advantage of our 14-day free trial for our real-time collaboration feature!

You can choose who has access to the book when collaborating

Use journals for authentic assessment

This example of Science Lab notebooks in Book Creator shows how Book Creator can transform learning (and this could be applied to any subject). Combining multimedia for students to show their knowledge and reflect on what they've learned will set them up for the whole year.

Learn more from Melissa Eaton's example and get her template here.

Foster Digital Citizenship

The start of the year is always a good time to introduce digital citizenship, and Book Creator can help with this. As you introduce the features of Book Creator, talk about why it's important to use a safe search for images, and why it's better to use copyright free images and how to properly cite them.

You can discuss what information is ok or not to share when publishing books online, and why you it's important to respect each other's work when collaborating on books together.

If you're looking for curriculum resources for teaching digital citizenship - we have just the thing! We partnered with Common Sense Education to bring you these three educational activity books.