In a recent Lenovo webinar featuring staff from the Ottawa Catholic School Board in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, most attendees said they used three or four apps in their classroom, but some used half a dozen or more. That makes sense: In classrooms worldwide, educators are constantly on the hunt for new apps that enhance the classroom learning experience—and that can create the educational continuity that a pandemic can fracture.
Of course, someone has to pay for all these apps. Sometimes it’s the teachers, sometimes the school—but too rarely is it a central purchasing or management agent. This means you can have duplicate apps and licenses, unused licenses, or perhaps even unlicensed versions that pose privacy concerns.
So just having a bunch of apps isn’t necessarily a good thing.
Rather, teachers may need to streamline back to just a few apps that provide the greatest bang for their budget, close as many learning gaps as possible, and facilitate the same learning experience in-person or remotely. At the Ottawa Catholic School Board and many other schools, one such app in heavy use is Book Creator. Worldwide, more than 2 million books per month are produced in Book Creator.
Book Creator is a Chromebook creativity app that lets students and teachers create multimedia digital books to capture stories, portfolios, science reports, and more. It’s a flexible software that seamlessly gives students an easy and creative platform for collaborating, communicating, and demonstrating their critical thinking skills.
Book Creator’s user experience is the same whether the student and teacher are face-to-face or connecting remotely. That capability for offering a seamless learning experience is why Lenovo is teaming with Book Creator.
A digital book for today’s education digital consumers
Book Creator provides a blank slate to free students’ creativity and personality—and templates to help nudge that creativity along if the blank slate is too overwhelming.
Of course, it’s not a “book” in the traditional sense. It’s a digital book that students fill with text, video, audio, and illustrations with the click of a button, and instantly publish and share. Students can work on the digital book alone or collaborate across devices, on a single topic or across the semester or school year to produce a digital book that showcases their knowledge, creativity, and personality.
Teachers can also use Book Creator to create homework assignments or learning modules to custom-fit their curriculum and lesson plans.
Simplified management so teachers can use it right now, not later
Here’s what else teachers (and administrators) will like about Book Creator: It’s easy to deploy and manage.
Lenovo users can make a single purchase of creativity app licenses with Chrome devices. They can buy licenses with the Lenovo device purchase or post-purchase.
Administrators can install it with the click of a button in the Google App Hub, activate and assign licenses to different users, and track usage throughout the school year—all from the Google Admin Console. That way, you ensure licenses are actually being used, easily redeploy ones that aren’t being used, and ensure you’re only paying for what students and teachers are using.
So, you could say that this is an app that checks all the learning boxes: support for the four Cs teaching approach that focuses on communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking to build crucial 21st century skills; reliable and simple to understand so students and teachers can get right to work; and easy to buy and administer. It gets all the messy management aspects out of the way so that students can focus on sharing their creativity and critical thinking.
As schools scramble to redefine teaching in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic—and establish a seamless model that will continue in some form after the pandemic—Book Creator on best-in-class Lenovo Chromebooks offers a solution for keeping students engaged and maximizing your technology budget.
To see how the Ottawa Catholic School Board and other educators are using Lenovo devices with Book Creator, check out our Unlocking Student Creativity playbook, part of Lenovo’s educational continuity resources.
Contact us at sales@bridgeteksolutions.com for more information.
