BookWidgets is an online tool that you can use to create interactive activities for your students to use in Google Classroom, Canvas, Moodle, Microsoft Teams and on the BookWidgets website. I covered the book widgets in depth in October. Throughout the year Bookwidgets has added more features for teachers and students. These features and more will be highlighted in an ISTE session entitled Transforming the Traditional Learning Environment with Bookwidgets.
Transforming into a traditional learning environment with BookWidget This will be presented The ISTE conference will be held on June 29 at 1:30 pm at Table 17 in the ballroom in La Nouvelle. The presentation will highlight the many types of interactive activities that teachers can create for students, how teachers can see student progress in realtime, and how students need to give meaningful feedback when they complete BookWidgets activities on the website or at the LMS of your choice. .
For those #NotatISTE
Aren’t you, like me, going to the ISTE conference this year? This doesn’t mean you can’t learn a lot about the same things announced and highlighted during the conference. In the main content, BookWidget has over a dozen free webinars highlighting ways that teachers and students can use BookWidget in a variety of topics, including science and world languages. Webinars also cover everything you need to know to create interactive activities to share with your students in Google Classroom, Canvas, Moodle, and Microsoft Teams.
Bookwidgets All-Access
Book Widgets is a free service. In other words, you can do a lot with it for free, but there are more features available for paying users. Those in the top 100 Use this link You can access all features for free for the next six months instead of the usual 30 day trial of all features.
My favorite book widget activity and features
BookWidgets offers more than thirty templates for students to create interactive activities to complete online. Some templates combine pairs and for traditional activities like memory games. These are other templates for activities that benefit from being online that are my favorites. These templates include a multimedia timeline, adding interactive markers to images, and a template for displaying a sequence of animations and video frames.
Last fall I highlighted a few more unique bookwidget activity templates. They are worth noting again. These are split whiteboards and split worksheets.
The split whiteboard template lets you create an activity where students can read text or watch a video on one side of the screen and use freehand drawing and writing on the other side of the screen to answer questions. The split worksheet template, like the split whiteboard template, shows student text on one side of the screen and questions on the other.
Realtime progress monitoring and scoring is a helpful component of the bookwidget template. Most bookwidget templates include an option to see students progress in realtime. Look for a small camera icon next to the title of a template to find these templates. A small checkbox icon next to the title of a template identifies it as one that offers automatic scoring.
Speaking of scoring, this past school launched the BookWidgets digital rubric template at the end of the year. These can be used to create a rubric to connect to any bookwidget activity. You can use rubrics to respond to attachments with or without scores. You also have the option of using emojis and symbols on your Rubrics.
Book widget in action!
Again, Bookwidget will present at the ISTE conference on Wednesday. If you don’t see them there, check out a free webinar of them or watch my short demo video embedded below. My demo contains the opinions of teachers and students on the platform.