Every so often, teachers reach out to me for enrichment activities for reading, math, science, or social studies. This is an activity I put together for 1st grade students and is modeled after Jerry Palotta's Who Would Win series. The grade level is 1:1 (one device per student) Chromebooks, so I designed this in Google Slides. The final page will have a Blabberize (Chatterpix could be an alternative if you have iOS devices, where the winning animal explains why they won the battle. A few resources students will use for this project are PebbleGo, Bookflix, TrueFlix, and Kiddle. 

If you would like a copy of the Google Slides file, please let me know. 

I also created a graphic organizer where students can record their findings. 

I love, love, love GoogleDrive, but haven't been impressed with the templates available. For years I made do by creating templates for students to use, but was thrilled to learn about LucidPress at a recent technology conference. LucidPress is a web based publisher with a variety of artistic, user friendly templates, and best of all your work can be saved to GoogleDrive! Recently, I had my students use the book template to compile their original poetry created during our English Language Arts poetry unit. The website and templates did take students some getting used to, but overall they caught on fast. In order to make the poetry books more "book like" I had students import the document into FlipSnack, and finally uploaded the flippable eBook in their GoogleSites portfolio.
Whether you are looking for templates, or just want a web based publisher that connects to GoogleDrive, I highly recommend you check out LucidPress!

Sample poetry books created by 5th grade students in LucidPress using the Photobook Template.

iBook Author is an amazing Mac App that allows users to easily create iBooks that can be shared on the iBook store.  I used this app with my fourth and fifth grade students as they worked through their research project, and created a book to share their learning.  Fourth graders researched topics of their choice, ranging from Native Americans to Helen Keller and One Direction.  Fifth grade was given the task of choosing a career, generating guiding questions, conducting research, and compiling findings into book form.  Students found iBook author user friendly, and commented how easy the templates were to change, and the variety of widgets allowed students the choice in how they wanted to present their information.  One caveat for teachers before setting students loose with iBook author is the existence of one template. This template is artistic in nature and contains sculptures that I did not find appropriate for my upper elementary students.  I will leave it up to you whether you want to keep this template, but if you don't, I have included directions on how to remove this template:  Directions to use on Mac:Quit iBook author, Open "Applications"
Find iBooks Author
Right click on iBooks Author
Choose "Show package content"
Open "Contents"
Open "Resources"
Scroll all the way down to templates
Select "Textbook 04"
Click, drag to trash and empty trash
Close it
Open iBook author
It should be gone! If you are lucky enough to have Mac Laptops as our fifth graders do, I highly recommend giving iBook Author a try! Not only will your students have another publishing option, but you can share your work in the iBook Store, allowing students to expand their readership.