Bookr

Ok I found Bookr through a librarian weekend training and thought that it was a dream come true at first because I already had some of my students working on writing books for younger partners and I thought that this would be a creative way to get them more involved in making the book as they could actually "see" each page and the fact that they could add pictures is pretty cool too. However it turned into a nightmare and I do NOT recommend it for schools!
First I had to have the tech guy unblock the site and Flickr, even though he was affraid of bad pictures (and I have to say that out of over a hundred kids and MULTIPLE searches this only happened once with the word "puppies"). Then it did not work on every computer (maybe because they did not have a plug-in but dispite my searching and trial and error I could not determine WHICH plug-in). So not all students could get on to the site to begin with. Big deal, we can live with that. Some of the kids came up with great books check out Taylor's here:


BUT then we had Bookr troubles! It was finicky about letting kids manipulate the pictures and the choice of pictures was admittedly poor especially for a great variety of school subjects (we had trouble with planets especially). Then many kids forgot to write down their code OR mistyped the address to get back to their book so that was a lot of work for me to go back and help them find their books to recycle and keep working. Most importantly though my biggest complaint with Bookr is that it sometimes just DELETED the pages kids were working on! I am not kidding, I watched it happen and it was not the kid's fault. Pages just went missing, saved work disappeared and it was unrealiable in the end. It was not worth it.