BookWidgets

BookWidgets gives teachers the ability to easily offer a personalized day plan to every student. It completely transformed the basic principle of a day planner, and now students have a voice in their own learning. Bookwidgets is a great app for iPads where teachers have a wealth of facilities to create resources to track students understanding of concepts, from a straight forward exit poll to some sophisticated and engaging quizzes. It integrates with other programs like Google Classroom, Canvas, and Moodle. A diverse library of widgets can be used to support all subject areas. Widgets are grouped by test and review (exit slips, flash cards, quizzes, timelines, and worksheets), games (bingo, memory, and crosswords), pictures and videos (hot-spot image, YouTube player, and image carousel), and math (active plot, charts, and arithmetic). Teachers can also embed PDFs, Google Maps, and Wikipedia articles.

A great programme for busy teachers using 1:1 iPad or Chromebooks that need to quickly put together some engaging and relevant resources for checking student understanding of the concepts being taught. The app has a comprehensive range of facilities to choose from including a quick ‘exit poll’ to highly engaging quiz games. The web-based account also reveals the level of sophistication behind this app with an excellent reporting facility with some useful analytics to track the levels of understanding of each student.

Registering for the account is easy and you are guided into the app smoothly where a wealth of example exercises is provided to get you up and running in no time at all. Having looked through the examples, which are conveniently categorized into subject areas, you are inspired to create your own contextualised exercises. By simply clicking on the ‘New Widget’ button you are spoilt for choice with a number of categories: ‘Test and Review’, ‘Games’, ‘Pictures and Videos’, ‘Math’, ‘Embed Third Party’ and a ‘Miscellaneous’ section, in all thirty six different types of exercise waiting for you to experiment with.

The test and review section provides you with a range of facilities ‘Exit Slip’, ‘Flash Cards’ and ‘Quiz’, these are the standard for a teacher assessing student understanding but they are intuitively put together, the ‘Quiz’ option provides over twenty two different types, from the normal text to the more sophisticated picture ‘drag and drop’ and numeric answer question. The extra options provide some new and innovative features for example the ‘Split Whiteboard’ offers the facility for the student to draw on the split screen in response to the stimulus material that the teacher provides. 

The games section provides a comprehensive set of engaging activities to enhance the learning process. With nine different sets of activities to choose from the teacher has wide-ranging set of tools. The examples section provide the teacher with many relevant examples, of special note is the ‘Pair Matching’ template which shows an example of a number of different maths problems the answers of which need to be selected if they match. Other sections range from the simple ‘Bingo’ game to ‘Jigsaw’ puzzles with your chosen picture and ‘Randomness’ a game where numbers, words or images can be combined randomly.

The pictures and videos section provides ten choices, all designed to add an interesting variety in the teachers portfolio of information delivery. For example the ‘Frame Sequence’ lets the teacher load up a sequence of pictures, to demonstrate some key changes in a process. Of note is the ‘Piano’ option where the teacher can put together a music score and this is then linked to a fully functioning piano keyboard! This section also provides an embedded link for the teachers to choose a YouTube or Vimeo video.

The maths section has four categories: ‘Active Plot’, ‘Arithmetic’, ‘Chart’ and ‘Spreadsheet’. Active Plot is a really interesting feature where the teacher can enter a formula and the students can adjust the parameters to get a greater graphical understanding of the formula. The spreadsheet feature is also of special interest with the ability for the teacher to set up data and formula and the student to experiment with these.

The embed third party apps section, as the title suggests, provides the teacher with the option to embed a google map, a PDF file, a web page and a Wikipedia article all extremely useful additions to enhance the teaching flow.

The final miscellaneous section offers a fully featured form/survey response template, which is very quick to put together and useful for collecting data and responses.

All of these widgets, when set up, are easily shareable through a unique code that the student enters into their student app.

The real power behind the application is the reporting facility, each exercise, when completed by the student can be sent directly through to the teacher dashboard on their device. The reporting facility shows a summary of the activities the students have carried out, with the grades, grouped by class, and a comprehensive breakdown of the answers the student has supplied. The report facility also provides a comment section for the teacher to provide written feedback to the student.

Teachers can customize each of the widgets, and a wizard walks them through the building process. Teachers can share finished widgets as a link or embed them on any website or through Google Classroom. Analytics allows teachers to track and assess student activity. A weekly teacher blog suggests new approaches and practical applications. 

BookWidgets is clearly in a class of its own, an extremely useful and powerful addition to the EdTech portfolio of any teacher wishing to truly enhance their student’s experience of learning.

You can download BookWidgets on your iOS devices from the Apple App Store.