E-book sounds fancy and mysterious when it involves sophisticated authoring tools. However, you and your students can also create attractive e-books and tell interesting stories just using the one of the most common tool – Microsoft PowerPoint.
The examples of storybooks below were created by students and one of our in-service teachers with PowerPoint.
1. The Gingerbread Man
In this storybook, you will be led to different endings when each time you reopen the book and click on a different choice for the gingerbread man. You might find your favorite ending.
A quick look inside the book:
*To play the storybook in PowerPoint, please firstly open the .pptx file you have downloaded, and save it as a .ppsx file (PowerPoint Show). After the ppsx PowerPoint Show file is opened, the story will be played automatically. You can also use the buttons (if any) on the screen to navigate the story. There is a short video tutorial in the end of this page showing you how to save the file as a .ppsx.
2. Eggday
This storybook was co-made by a group of students who acted as different characters in the story.
Have a look inside:
3. Pigs Might Fly
Creatively, students added interactive elements to their storybook, for example asking their readers to make a guess. Enjoy the interaction with the three pigs in the story!
Look inside:
Besides PowerPoint, there are many tools available for making an e-book. See examples of e-books made with other tools below:
4. School Picnic
AdobeVoice is also an excellent tool for student-made eBooks. In this example, the teacher taught her primary students how to write a diary, using a story book (Camp Diary) as a model. She then asked them to draft their own diary entry based on a school visit to Taipo Waterfront park. After checking their drafts, students made and shared their own eBook based on their school visit to the park and pictures they took there. Here is an excellent example.
5. Here Come the Pirates
6. It’s Okay to be Different
Ms Fiona Yung, a primary English teacher, made this eBook “It’s Okay to Be Different” with Adobe Spark. This is a good example of how to use eBooks in a creative way. Ms Yung inserted an original page into the book, giving a new way that “It’s okay to be different” for the story. She wrote, “It’s okay to eat macaroni and cheese in the bath!” And she has signed the page with her name.
This is an example to students of what they can do themselves… help write the story! The activity would have all the students read the book and write one of their own pages, including illustrating it and signing. The final eBook could be different for each student (with just each student’s own “page” added), or an eBook with many – or all! – of the students’ pages could be created as a class-written eBook.
Have you got any inspiration for your own storybook? Give a try and create your own storybook!
Check out: how to make your first e-book with PowerPoint and Book Creator.
How to play the storybooks (.pptx) you just downloaded above:
The story can be “told” automatically in PowerPoint when the file of the storybook is saved in the format of ppsx – a file that starts presentation in slideshow view. Check out the quick tutorial below:
If you encounter any problems in the process of opening the storybooks above, please leave us comments.