100 eBooks in 5 Weeks

Radio201

This semester, my Junior High students produced more than a hundred eBooks, and published them on the eBook site, Flipsnack. You can find them here.

They came up with their own titles. Though they were free to choose any genre, any subject, there was a wide variety of non-fiction this year.

Let me give you some context: The eBook project is their capstone project to prove that they understand the applications, and their common document formatting features. By that I mean layout, design, fonts, margins, white space, line spacing, avoiding widows and orphans, and using all those nitty gritty features found on the ribbon of Google docs, Microsoft Word, Google Slides and PowerPoint. The book is created in Google Slides - which seems an odd way to format a book, right? Well, with a few simple tweaks it's quite a malleable application. When you see the finished product (like this one), they bear no resemblance to a slide deck!

And if you're wondering wondering why we 'publish' eBooks in a computer class, let me put it this way. Sure, my students are required to learn touch-typing and improve their speed and accuracy. We do this each week. But toward the end of the semester I tell them (half in jest) that they were tricked into believing they signed up for a Computer Class - when in fact they walked into a Communications Class that happened to have computers. Not the other way around. The purpose of ‘learning’ computers is to help them master much more than mechanical skills. It's to communicate better. Whether it is learning to code, making stunning presentations, manipulating images in Photoshop, designing a website (all of which they in fact do here in the computer lab), or crank out term papers for other classes, the goal is always communication. They must learn to communicate effectively with a teacher, an audience, a customer, an organization.

You get the idea. Enjoy the podcast!