BookWidgets is an online tool that you can use to create interactive activities for your students to use in Google Classroom, in Canvas, in Moodle, in Microsoft Teams, and right on the BookWidgets website. I covered BookWidgets in depth back in October. Throughout the year BookWidgets added more features for teachers and students. Those features and more will be highlighted at an ISTE session titled Transforming the Traditional Learning Environment With BookWidgets.
Transforming the Traditional Learning Environment With BookWidgets will be presented at the ISTE conference on June 29th at 1:30pm in the La Nouvelle Ballroom at table 17. The presentation will highlight the many types of interactive activities that teachers can create for students, how teachers can view students’ progress in realtime, and how to give meaningful feedback to students when they complete BookWidgets activities on the website or in the LMS of your choice.
For Those #NotatISTE
Are you, like me, not going to the ISTE conference this year? That doesn’t mean you can’t learn about many of the same things that are announced and highlighted during the conference. Case in point, BookWidgets has a series of more than a dozen free webinars highlighting the ways that teachers and students can use BookWidgets in a variety of content areas including science and world languages. The 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
BookWidgets is a freemium service. In other words, there are a lot of things you can do with it for free, but there are even more features available to paid users. The first 100 people who use this link can get access to all features for free for the next six months instead of the usual 30 day trial of all the features.
My Favorite BookWidgets Activities and Features
BookWidgets offers more than thirty templates for creating interactive activities for students to complete online. Some of the templates are for traditional activities like matching pairs and memory games. It’s the other templates for activities that benefit from being online that are my favorite ones.Those templates include multimedia timelines, adding interactive markers to images, and templates for showing a sequence of animation and video frames.
Last fall I also highlighted a few other unique BookWidgets activity templates. Those are worth noting again. They are split whiteboards and split worksheets.
The split whiteboards template lets you create an activity in which students read text and or view 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 worksheets template, like the split whiteboard template, shows students text on one side of the screen and questions on the other side.
Realtime progress monitoring and scoring are helpful components of BookWidgets templates. Most of the templates in BookWidgets include an option for viewing students’ progress in realtime. To find those templates look for a little camera icon next to a template’s title. A little checkbox icon next to a template’s title identifies it as one that offers automatic scoring.
Speaking of scoring, late in this past school year BookWidgets introduced digital rubric templates. These can be used to create a rubric to attach to any activity in BookWidgets. You can use the rubrics to give feedback with or without scores attached. There is also an option to use emojis and symbols in your rubrics.
BookWidgets in Action!
Again, BookWidgets will be presenting at the ISTE conference on Wednesday. If you can’t see them there, take a look at one of their free webinars or watch my short demo video embedded below. My demo includes the teacher and student views of the platform.
