Karen Kirsch Page

Locations: All

Customizing Teaching Materials: Creating Your Own eBooks for Reading and Instruction

Creating content, customized for your learners and classroom has never been easier! We will explore a free app called Book Creator that allows us to make interactive storybooks, comic adventures, instructional materials, student work portfolios, research journals, poetry books, science reports, and more. Combine text, images, audio and video to engage your learners and make learning accessible to a wide range of learning styles by bringing multi-modality into your content and infusing creativity throughout your curriculum. In addition to creating instructional materials yourself by making ebooks, you can motivate learners by providing a platform for reading, writing, researching and creating as they become published authors!

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” -Frederick Douglass

Karen Kirsch Page is the Associate Director of Professional Development at the Center for Technology and School Change at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she leads a team in the design of learning experiences for teachers in New York City and around the globe. In addition to teachers, she works with principals, district leaders, organizations, and governments on national and international reform projects. She started out in education at Town School for Boys in San Francisco as a K-8 technology and STEM electives teacher and in parallel worked to provide instructional support for K-12 teachers both in the U.S. and Africa after founding a free annual education technology conference for underserved teachers, EdTech Summit Africa, now in its eighth year. Karen is a co-founder and board president of the non-profit EdTech Global Africa based in South Africa, dedicated to global education transformation. With experience in filmmaking, the music business, and creative digital and technical arts, Karen is passionate about helping schools and organizations around the world create cultures receptive to implementing technology for creative teaching and learning. She has worked with schools and districts in inquiry-based learning approaches, project-based learning (PBL), and has helped to design and develop coding, robotics, makerspace and visual design programs. With a B.A. in Broadcast Engineering from San Francisco State University and an M.A. in Instructional Technology and Media at Teachers College, she is now pursuing her doctorate at Teachers College in Adult Learning and Leadership. Her research interests are at the intersection of equitable access to high quality learning, professional development, and the meaningful integration of technology in education.