Epic! Books Reflection

This week we got the opportunity to explore two great online resources: ScreenCastify and Epic! Books. These are two great tools that teachers can utilize in their classroom, and I am excited to continue exploring them as I move through this program and into my future teaching career. 

This week’s chosen blog prompt was just on Epic! Books, but I couldn’t resist sharing about the platform we used to create our Epic! Books tutorial, as it was so great and fun! ScreenCastify is a great online tool, with both a free and paid version to create screen recordings off of a device. On the site, you have the chance to record your video (can record just your screen, or include yourself in it as well), as well as edit and export your video. All for free! This can be very helpful for teachers, especially with blended learning and covid. This is a great tool for teachers to be able to record a tutorial one time, and show it to all pf their classes, or send it to their students as something they can refer back to.

This would also be a great tool for students to use in projects. When I was attending Thompson Rivers University one of my projects was making and recording my own tutorial on a subject. I wish I knew of this tool then; it would have made it so much easier!

I am very excited to further explore this platform and use it in different contexts throughout my schooling and teaching! 

Epic! Books is a great platform that I absolutely loved exploring! To get to know it better please see the tutorial I have included below!

I have seen classroom teachers use Epic! Books during literacy centres, but this is the first time I have had the opportunity to explore it for myself (because it is so user-friendly that the kids can navigate it and use it by themselves, and love it!). As explained in my tutorial above, Epic! Books is a platform with countless children books (including some of my personal favourites – Scaredy Squirrel and Robert Munsch) that they can read and explore independently. There are many great features that help build students reading fluency and independency. If you click on an unknown word in a book it will give you the definition and read it aloud so students can hear the pronunciation. There are also audiobooks, so this platform can reach and grow the love of books for any level of reader! Each student that is a part of your class has their own profile, and the platform takes statistics for each reader, including the number of books finished, hours read, and videos watched. It even tells teachers if students are just quickly flipping through pages of books, rather than taking the time to actually read them. One draw-back of the free version of Epic! Books is that it is only available for free during school hours, so students can’t use it for their reading at home.