Expand your lessons with iPad activities in minutes

Many of our customers first hear about BookWidgets in the context of custom widgets for iBooks Author. But did you know you don’t have to write a multi-touch book to take advantage of BookWidgets? There’s a much simpler way to get started: the BookWidgets for iPad app.

With BookWidgets, you can make your own exercises and activities, and easily share them with your classroom. Because you can do this in baby steps of single exercises, it’s much easier to incorporate the iPad in your existing lessons. You don’t need to embark on a big I’ll-write-my-own-textbook adventure, but instead you can make single exercises — one at a time — that fit perfectly with the topic you’re teaching and your student’s interests and skill level.

For instance, if you’re a language teacher, you can complement existing lessons with simple games, like a wordsearch or a crossword puzzle to have your kids practice this week’s vocabulary on their iPad — at school, or at home.

If you teach math and are explaining e.g. sine functions, expand your lessons by having kids “play” with the Active Plot widget configured to show the sine function, so they can develop an intuition for how that function “works”.

You can think of these exercises and activities as small apps with a very specific function. You create them by using one of the many wizards — in a matter of minutes. Examples include simple quizes, specific math exercises, but also more fun types to bring some life into the classroom like bingo games or hangman puzzles.

Once created, you share your widgets with students via a “shortcode”: a short combination of letters and numbers that uniquely identifies your widget. Students enter this shortcode on their iPad, using our free iPad app, and your widget starts playing instantly. Apart from the initial installation of the free app, there’s no installation required for widgets you create. No need to involve IT, just simple, instant, hassle-free distribution of your content.

You can also get a special link to your widget — something like http://bookwidgets.com/play/VEVVC — which you can insert just about anywhere: a wiki page, an email, a tweet, but also in an iTunes U course, or in a Showbie folder. Whatever system you use to manage & share content with your students, BookWidgets links will fit right in.

Give it a try: we offer a free trial, and the iPad app for students is free as well. Nothing to lose, tons to gain…

Get started with a free trial of BookWidgets

Niels Vanspauwen

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BookWidgets enables teachers to create fun and interactive lessons for tablets, smartphones, and computers.

Choose from over 40 exercise templates (quizzes, crosswords, jigsaw puzzles, ...), and adapt them with your own content.