What is an electronic storybook?

An electronic storybook (e-book) is a book that is read (or listened to) on a computer. Publishing companies produce high quality e-books with incredible graphics, sound and interactivity. For example, you can click on objects in an illustration to learn more about a particular object by having words pop up (vocabulary development), a voiced description, or music. The student may have the computer read the book or the student may read the book independently, calling upon the computer for help with difficult passages or words. The Internet has many free e-books for student use. Simply Google for electronic storybooks and surf through the the various sites. It may take you a while to find what you are looking for so you may want to narrow your search to primary/intermediate or by subject area.

Teacher or student produced e-books may or may not contain all of the above elements. Primary teachers can create a class storybook assigning one page to each student or groups of students. The teachers can then put the illustrations together into one storybook for the entire class to enjoy. Intermediate teachers are encouraged to place students into groups to allow for time constraints. The finished product can range from a simply illustrated self read book to an interactive book created as a website with links to sounds, animated illustrations, and interactive options. The important thing is to allow either your creativity or your students' creativity to come through!

E-books can be produced in a variety of formats. A presentation software like PowerPoint or Corel Presentation can be used inserting digital pictures of the students' illustrations. Creating e-book in presentation format allows for controlling the speed of page advancement, recording narration, adding action (page forward) buttons, mouse over and mouse click actions, preset animation, and page transition effects.

However, e-books can also be produced as web pages or a set of web pages in any web page creation software (Netscape Composer, Publisher, FrontPage). Animated clipart can be added to create movement and sound files can be linked within the book. Interactivity can be integrated using hyperlinks to sound files and other actions.