Thanks to a how-to tip on creating ePub books by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano, I figured out how to make an ebook of student work. 2ePub is a free ePub converter that is easy to use. Our first graders had drawn their “Wacky” self-portraits in MS Paint so I inserted those pictures into MS Word, saved it as a PDF, then uploaded it to 2ePub. Extremely easy!! Following Silvia’s instructions, I pulled the book into my iTunes account and added artwork for the cover. To put it on our school iPads I had to email the file to myself then opened it in iBooks.

I didn’t have as much success with the 3rd grade poems! The 1st grade books are just pictures; no text. The 3rd grade students included clip art with their poetry. I tried all kinds of formatting; uploading several different documents. Unfortunately I wasn’t pleased with any of the ePub formats. Page breaks weren’t where I wanted them to be. Occasionally, words were split. I ended up saving the poetry as a PDF and opening them in iBooks that way. You don’t get the “book” feel that you have with an ePub book but it works.

When I showed the students that their work was on the iPad, they were ecstatic! 

I’ll email parents with the ePub and PDF files so that they’ll have access to them. It seems that many of the students have either an iPad or an iTouch so they could easily add these to iBooks.

From what I’ve read, it seems that the ePub conversion would be much easier if I had a Mac but, alas, that isn’t in the budget now so I’ll just work with what I’ve got.

Cantrell seuss (open in iBooks or open with Adobe Digital Editions)