This week I was exploring for the possibility to publish books created by students. There are many sites out there. I started my journey at Web 2.0 Guru site. This site lists top web 2.0 tools for educators. I looked through the different possibilities and the site MixBook caught my eye. I went to the site and started my exploration. I discovered they have a MixBook for educators and went into it to see what they had to offer. I watched tutorials and testimonial videos about Mixbook.
Tutorial how to create book
I liked the option of being able to create a book that can be in digital format or having the option to have it published. I started to investigate further and decided to see how easily it was to create your own book. I am familiar with working with layout programs and was curious to see how this program worked. I went through my images and uploaded the picture I would use for this project. I worked with images from my son's First Holy Communion that was last weekend.
I found that the uploading went very easily. Then you need to begin by choosing a theme to begin. I decided to choose a blank canvas theme to allow a little more flexibility in how you layout or color schemes that are used. Then I began to create. I found the drag and drop option very useful. you also have the option to hide images that were used. Overall it was a very easy tool to use to create a book. I found the only draw back is if you have an image that is not perfectly straight you cannot rotate the image within a frame to correct it. You do have some limited editing capabilities with the program but make sure you do most of the editing prior to uploading to MixBook.
You have different options of how you would like to share you creation. I like that you have the option to embed you creation so you have the option to add to your blog or website. Below is an example of what I created.
