epic! Updates

I am excited to share with you that I was selected to be an epic! Master Teacher, and that means I will be bringing updates on the epic! app and website! If you haven't heard of epic! you need to check it out. It is an e-book library with over 25,000 titles for children 12 and under. It is free for educators and available for home use for $7.99 per month. It covers several genres and includes audio books and books that can be read aloud. They recently added educational videos which were a hit with my first graders! The students can earn badges as incentives, and teachers can access individual reading logs for students. Now, on to a new feature...

Teachers can now create collections of books and assign them to students! You can access this feature in the search tab. Once you find a book that you want to add to a collection click "Add to" and select collection. You can create a collection, add notes/directions to students and name it, or select an existing collection to add the book to. You can view your collections under the "My Library" tab. Click the name of the collection to assign to students. This has so many possibilities! You could name collections to correspond to guided reading groups, certain comprehension skills, or research projects!

Let me know how you might use this new feature! Follow epic! on Twitter @EpicKidsBooks or on the web at www.getepic.com. To read an article review about using picture e-books in K-6 I did for grad class, click here.