Generally, education is moving away from paper and locomoting to digital. This post is going to be about the reverse: Turning the digital into paper.
Digital provides endless possibilities for student creation. While I encourage many forms of online publication–it’s the easiest way to spread student work–they still get most excited about the old-fashioned form:
The hard copy.
Each year, we publish a class literary journal for college composition. Each student chooses one of their favorite essays and does the following:
- Edits the essay again for grammatical and style issues
- Selects copyright free images to accompany their writing, OR creates their own images
- Copies their writing into a template in Google Slides
There are some good online templates, such as Lucidpress. However, Google Slides is a quick and easy way to create a hard copy book AND an app that students are already familiar with.
Here’s how I do it.
- I create a Google Slides file and adjust the slides to be 8.5 x 11 inches. I create several slides with several templates.
- I distribute the file to students through Google Classroom and MAKE A SEPARATE COPY for each student.
- When students are finished pasting their essay & images, I open each file and copy/paste each student’s essay slides.*
- Download the file as a PDF
- Choose a publication company. I use MagCloud.
* You could certainly distribute the file as a shared file for the class. This will save the work of copy/pasting their slides into your master file. I do this often for other activities. For this assignment, though, I wanted to avoid confusion of students creating slides, accidentally deleting others’ slides, not copy/pasting templates before use, etc.
On the last day of school, my seniors found their literary journals through a BreakoutEDU game. It was cool, but what was cooler: they spent the rest of the period signing each other’s pages, like the real authors they are.
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