Bookr

Tonight I created this great little book about plants in just a few minutes using Bookr, a website that allows you to create books using beautiful flickr photos and your own added text.

In another class I'm in right now, we're designing a unit plan for teaching content ESL through science units, and I thought that Bookr would be a great opportunity to create a resource that drew upon that unit.  We've been discussing how valuable second language learning through content areas can be: students learn academic vocabulary and registers in a context-embedded setting while reinforcing content learned in other classes.

Photography is one of the most compelling mediums for displaying the beauty of the natural world, and Flickr provides us with essentially limitless quantities of just that.  With Bookr, I could have students looking at incredibly colorful, beautiful photos that can help them appreciate the significance of what they're learning.  That's why I chose to add some text about humans' responsibility to take care of and protect plant life; students can connect these photos with the idea and draw some meaning from it.

A more ambitious application of this program would be its use in a science project.  We could have, say, a 'class plant' that we shoot photos of in its different stages of life, and create a Bookr to catalogue the life cycle of a plant.  I could have students shoot photos of the various steps of a science experiment, and make a Bookr that has each step of the experiment listed under each photo.  Students could then share their experiments with the class.