Student reflection during experiential learning should capture the rich experience where students are empowered to create their own narratives. Join this discussion of Book Creator and how it moves student reflection into the digital space and beyond simple text to students curating their own 21st century travel diary.
Study abroad is one of the essential experiential learning opportunities for students. Student participants are often encouraged to reflect on the experience through various critical reflection exercises and essays that challenge them to think deeply about what they observe about other cultures and about themselves during the experience. There are a variety of ways for students to document these reflections, including via a traditional essay format sent via email to the instructor, perhaps as part of a distance-learning course at the home university or as part of a more informal study abroad assessment. However, given that the student’s experience is certainly more rich than perhaps simple text can capture, faculty and students may seek other ways to record these observations and reflections. Students should be given the opportunity to create more than just an essay to capture the myriad events, observations, and impressions they have during the immersion experience.
Elements of “maker culture,” which already encourages learning through doing and creative thinking, may be leveraged to inspire students to craft and curate their own unique narrative of the study abroad experience as part of a digital journaling space. By freeing these reflections from the conventional essay format and embracing an electronic or web-based platform, we can transition these activities into meaningful and cohesive “digital memory boxes” that aim to capture a multitude of student experiences. These “memory boxes” should incorporate text and other various media so as to allow students to curate their observations in text with photos, voiceovers, among other options to complement the text. With various portfolio and digital journaling websites available, choosing a platform that meets the needs of the course assignments as well as to encourage the students to tell their own stories and use their creativity to enrich their reflections.
Book Creator is an online platform that allows students and teachers to create, publish and read their own books. Though popular in theK-12 setting, it is a compelling choice as a platform to document reflection activities during study abroad as described above. Not only does it offer a space to document reflection, this space itself is a book at its heart, allowing students to truly craft a narrative, with each new reflection as a chapter in their book. These “chapters” may be illustrated with photos, drawings, and videos and narrated by the student’s own voice, thanks to the versatility of the platform. Once created, this book may be shared with instructors, classmates, family members, friends, and truly anyone via the sharing capabilities of the platform. Students take full advantage of all the platform has to offer in their creation and curation of these e-books to document their travel experience.
This session will explore the use of BookCreator as a digital platform for online critical reflection, specifically during immersion experiences. It will present one instructor’s experimentation with the platform as a space of creation and curation of student content, discussing lessons learned from two iterations of study abroad cohorts in a distance-learning course. The presenter will provide an overview of the BookCreator platform and present specific examples of student e-books as well as student and instructor feedback on the platform. The session will also discuss the challenges faced by the instructor using the platform and ways to minimize or resolve these challenges.
Level of Participation: While this session will follow a lecture-format, it will incorporate multiple opportunities for audience engagement. It will open with audience engagement about how they document their travel experience, specifically the interplay of text and other media, like photos and video. During the presentation, the audience will also have the opportunity for hands-on experience with the Book Creator platform, including creating their own “chapter” in the presenter’s book to test out the platform.
Session Goals: Individuals attending this presentation will be able to identify and discuss the basics of Book Creator and its adaptability as a digital journaling space in general and within the context of a study abroad experience. They will be able to compare their experiences with similar e-portfolio and digital journaling spaces and to describe the advantages and disadvantages of ways in which students may create and curate their reflections in digital spaces in a more dynamic wayt . Lastly, they will be able to gain hands-on experience with the platform and explore its features and discuss the possibilities for future use.