In the age of digital literacy, technology has reinvented the traditional ways of fostering creativity and storytelling in students. Today, the ability to construct narratives and express oneself through multiple modalities is no longer confined to paper and pencil.
Instead, it extends to digital platforms where students can become authors, illustrators, and publishers in their own right. One example of tools that empower students creativity are book-making apps. These are powerful tools that redefine the creative process, making it more engaging, interactive, and accessible than ever before.
These apps serve as digital canvases, allowing students to weave words, images, sounds, and even videos into compelling narratives. They can invent vibrant characters, build imaginary worlds, and breathe life into their stories, all while honing their writing, reading, and digital skills.
But book-making apps aren’t just about storytelling. They’re also tools for learning, helping students understand and retain complex information. By transforming a history lesson into a vivid comic strip, or by crafting a science report as an illustrated eBook, students engage more deeply with the material, leading to better comprehension and recall.
In this blog post, we will cover some of the best book-making apps available for students. Each one, with its unique features and strengths, offers a different path to the same destination: empowering students to tell their stories, learn effectively, and develop crucial 21st-century skills.
Best book making apps for students
Here are some excellent book making apps that can empower students to become authors and illustrators, all while enhancing their digital literacy skills:
Book Creator
Book Creator is an excellent app for creating digital books. Students can add text, images, audio, and video to their pages, making their stories interactive and engaging. Check out our full review of Book Creator to learn more.
StoryJumper
StoryJumper allows students to create their own books using a wide variety of characters, props, and scenes. Students can also upload their own images, making their stories truly unique. This app is web-based and doesn’t require a download.
Storybird
This is a platform that uses visual prompts to stimulate students’ writing. Students can choose art from a vast, curated collection and then write their own narratives around the images.
Pixton
Although Pixton is primarily a comic creator, it can also be used as a powerful storytelling tool. Students can create their own characters and scenes and use them to tell a story.
Mystorybook
This tool is user-friendly and lets kids create illustrated storybooks. It includes a nice set of characters, props, and scenes, and students can also upload their own images.
Pictello
This iOS app allows students to create visual stories and talking books. Each page in a Pictello story can contain a picture, a short text, and a recorded sound or text-to-speech voices.
BookTraps
BookTraps enables young learners to create their own books using their own narrative stories. Students can create characters, add illustrations, write the narrative of their story book and when done they can share them online as eBooks or print them out to share physical copies with others.
PicaBook
PicaBook is a book making Android app that allows students to create and share beautiful picture book stories. Besides text and visuals, students can record their audio narrations and add it to pages.
Books created in PicaBook are saved to the app’s library and can be accessed across different devices. Students can share their creations with others allowing them to read their books without the need for creating an account.
Character Story Planner 2
Character Story Planner 2, as its name suggests, helps students plan their stories using a template system that allows them to ‘fill the questionnaires from the default contents or from user uploaded templates’. Using the Character Story Planner will enable students to develop structural elements of the story including characters, groups, relations, scenes, and more.
Story Plotter
Story Plotter is an Android app that students can use to create plots for various writing projects including short stories, manga, novels, drama, etc. Some of the features Story Plotter provides include idea note and plot note for brainstorming ideas, character correlation diagrams, story order changes, and more. While several of these features are available for free, the app charges $4/month for automatic data synchronization across different devices.
Pure Writer
Pure Writer is a mobile word processor where students can write their own books and stories. The editor is pretty minimalistic with way less distractions allowing students to focus on the act of writing. Some of the features it provides include smooth scrolling, swipe-to-collapse-keyboard, history record support, undo and redo supports, local and cloud backup and more.
My Picture Books
My Picture Books helps students create their own comic and picture books. The process is simple and easy: Students add their own pictures to a page, insert text and audio, repeat for all pages, and when done click to share with others.
My Picture Books works best on tablets. ‘ If you edit a book on your phone, view the app in landscape mode. This way you can see and use the button on the right of the pages that allows you to remove or change the order of pages.’
