This document describes a middle school language arts teacher's experience having her students create an interactive iBook about Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol instead of using a traditional textbook. The teacher provided minimal guidelines and structure and focused on community, creativity, collaboration and critical thinking. Students were involved in all aspects of the project from planning to writing to editing. Students reported enjoying having ownership over their work and collaborating with their classmates. They felt they learned more by teaching themselves through this project compared to traditional instruction. The teacher suggests other educators could team up on Twitter to create "textbooks" or have students make annotated novels or partner on original textbooks.

1. C U L T I V A T I N G
A C U L T U R E O F
I N N O V A T I V E
C R E A T O R S :
I B O O K S & T H E
C C S S
Rachel Diephouse
Middle School Language Arts
rachel@diephouse.com
@racheldiep

2. What if…
…we focused on community before the rules?

3. What if…
…we involved students in our learning?

4. What if…
…students had to work on something until it was
ready to be published?

5. What if…
…Creative Commons was a necessity, not a
requirement?

6. What if…
…we weren’t bound to textbook companies?

7. What if…
…we collaborated to create something worth
sharing?

8. What if…
…we made our “what if’s” reality?

9. C U L T I V A T I N G
A C U L T U R E O F
I N N O V A T I V E
C R E A T O R S :
I B O O K S & T H E
C C S S
Rachel Diephouse
Middle School Language Arts
rachel@diephouse.com
@racheldiep

10. Inspiration

11. Inspiration

12. Inspiration
“Book Bored College Education Female Girl Learn” by PublicDomainPictures on Pixabay

14. But first… community!

15. V
I
S
I
O
N

16. A few “guidelines”:

17. and a brief tour of iBooks
Author & it’s capabilities

19. And got out of the
way(ish)

27. creativity
communication
collaboration
critical
thinking

28. Reading

29. Reading

30. Reading

31. Writing

32. Writing

33. Writing

35. “I learned that you can
learn a lot more from a
book if you look
between the pages.”

36. “I loved seeing
everyone work
together as one big
team. Everyone’s
work has really
paid off.”

37. “I learned how
important it is to
communicate and
cooperate with others.
It helped that if
something needed to
be done, all you
needed to do was talk.”

38. “I think we should
definitely do it again. Plus
we can learn more about
different stuff that you
wrote and other people
wrote. :)”

39. “I enjoyed that people had free-range of what
they wanted to do. That was special and
showed who they are as a person. Also, I liked
how when people like what they do, they are
more open to others’ ideas.”

40. “In the beginning, I thought we were just
doing it to help later classes understand A
Christmas Carol more, but actually learning,
actually teaching ourselves, helped even
more than having you explain it to us and
forgetting about it the next day.”

41. “I definitely enjoyed this process. I enjoyed
that we had such an open assignment. Even
though it was a lot of work, it was still a lot of
fun. WE GOT TO MAKE OUR OWN IBOOK
FOR GOODNESS SAKES!!!!!”

43. What if…
…Twitter educators teamed up to make
“textbooks”?

44. What if…
…your class made an annotated novel?

45. What if…
…you paired up with other classroom(s) to
create the next best textbook?

46. What if…
…you allowed your students to be real,
published authors?

47. the solutions. Followers think and talk about