 Hello and welcome to today's Wednesday webinar. Today's webinar is about making reading Epic with the Epic Reading app. And this presentation is based off of a training session I was going to do at the winter workshop. So if you'd like to find the presentation resources, you can go to bit.ly backslash make epic. And you can have all the slides from the presentation. So first of all, let's look at what is Epic? And Epic is an app that can help transform your reading classroom and give students choice in reading in a digital format. So Epic is actually the number one children's ebook library. And it gives unlimited access to students and teachers for free of over 25,000 high quality children's books. And those high quality children's books are ones that are recent titles. They support AR and lexical levels. And there's all different kinds. You can have a book read to you. You can have videos. There's all different things inside this app as well. So I'm going to get out of the presentation. And I'm going to jump into my teacher page. We're going to look at the teacher page first. And then we'll jump into what the students would see. So your landing page on your teacher's page. First of all, I guess if you want to get to this app, if you go to www.getepic.com and sign in with your teacher email address, everything in this resource for you and your students in the school setting is free. If you wish for your child to utilize this at home, you can send a parent letter home. However, there is a charge for the parents to use it at home for their students. But basically, when you get to the landing page, we'll talk a little bit more about this page later because it's what the students would see. But there's all different resources in here. I'm going to go to my teacher dashboard and we're gonna talk about what you'll see as a teacher and the feedback that you get from this app as a teacher. So basically you can set your students up with their own little profiles and you can upload your class via a CSV file. So it's very easy. And once you upload them and then the student logs in, they can select certain things from their profile. Again, we'll talk a little bit more about that later. You can set up different groups that you can access for your students under your profiles. The activity is going to show you all of what your students have read based on the most recent to the latest. And so, as you can see here, one of my students read the I Can Smell book. She read that book in one minute and she flipped 13 of the pages on this date. Now, what's important about that is you can tell if the student actually spent time to read that book or if they were just flipping through the pages and not reading because it is time based. And you can actually go in and see how much was completed up that book. And it'll do that for every student and every book that they open. So as you can see on this one, she pretty much just opened the first page and closed the book and went to something different. And so there is an evaluation process in here that you can see. So in this book, she completed the book. It took her six minutes and she flipped 41 pages. Now, some of these books also have quizzes or you could put a quiz with them and you could see those results as well. So that is in the activity. This is where you can view your quizzes. And if you make a quiz for a book, you can review how the students did and how many students took it and the percentage that they got from the book or from the quiz. Assignments is where you can set up a group of students and then get a collection of books. If you set up a collection of books and you can assign those to the students along with their quizzes. And so you can see, I have assigned this living and non-living to two students and zero have completed it. Also up here at the top, you can kind of have a quick evaluation of your class. So I actually have 37 kids loaded to my class. Seven books have been read, 1.1 hours of reading for the whole class and there's been one video watched. So that is from the teacher perspective. And under this, you can come in to search and I'm gonna show you a little bit more of that later but you can search by topic level. You can come down here to search advance and you can filter by AR or Lexile level. You can sort by age and you can sort by fiction and non-fiction. So I'm gonna go here and I'm just gonna select AR level and then I'm gonna type in plants because we've been working on plants in science. And then you can kind of see, I'm gonna set the AR level again here. There we go. What the information that it gives you. So here it's telling you that there's a group of books called plants, kindergarten age range is six to eight. There's one video and 41 books in that collection. And if I keep scrolling down, you can see that the age range changes. And right next to that, you can actually click here and add it to a group or a favorites list. You can select from collections, books, read to me books, videos or audio books. So what's the difference between a read to me book and an audio book? Read to me book is strictly where the book, you can read along with the book. And so if I click here and I click on one of those books, it's gonna take me in and it'll read the words with me. And as you notice, it follows along or highlights the words as it reads it. You can also click on a word and get the definition in the pronunciation of the word right there. And that's just an example of an audio book. Now, if I go or excuse me, a read to me book, if I go to the audio books, this is more of digitally driven. So it'll just play the book and the kids listen. So when you open a book, you also get some information on that book too. So this is a seven minute audio book. The age level is four. This one does not have an AR level or a lexical level listed. And there's also a rating that comes out up here. And you could, this is where you as a teacher can create a quiz for this book or add it to a collection that you've already created. And these are some collections that I had created just to show you. So if I click add to a collection, I can say, okay, I wanna add this to my kindergarten audio books. And then it puts it in that collection. So now I'm going to take you into what a student would see and how easy it is for a student to get into this reading app. Okay, now let's go in and look at Epic from a student perspective. What I like about this app is that you can actually have, if you have a shared card of iPads, you can actually include more than one teacher account on the Epic app and it makes it very easy. So as a student, I'm gonna open the Epic app. And then if you have a shared card, like I said, you can have multiple teachers on here, but then they would just select their teacher and then they'd go in and they see everybody in their class. And so they need to select their name. And I'm gonna select a new one that I haven't opened here yet. And the first time that they open their app, they get to select different things that are interesting to them or of interest to them. And so then they select next and then it takes them into their, basically their recommended profile based on the interest that they chose. Now, if they ever wanna change those interests, if they select my preferences, they can go back in and change their preferences right here as well. And so they can add different things in here as to what they're interested in. So once they do that, the recommended options are gonna change based on their recommendations or their choices that they made. And so if I scroll through here, as a student, I see different recommendations of here's some featured collections and that's a group of books, recommendations for that student at that level with those interests. They also have learning videos that are recommended for that level. Community collections are collections that are created by other teachers and shared. These read to me books are, again, the ones where you can click on them and it basically will play the book. Police car, whoo! And the students can follow along. Now, as you notice, students as they read and open in complete books, they receive different badges. So I'm gonna go back up here to the top and I'm gonna click on this dropdown because there's different things that they could access here. So obviously, as I mentioned before, they have the recommended, but they could also sort by just learning videos. And teachers, I suggest that you check these learning videos out because if you're working on something specific, there is some really great learning videos in here that can go along with your topics or your curriculum areas. The collections are the collections that you can set up for your students or the collections are also ones that are related to the student interests and it will give them a whole group of books that are related to those interests. Popular books are the ones that receive high ratings from students in their interest levels and so they can search through the most popular books. They can come down here and search by Read to Me Audio and I showed you a little bit about what those were. In the beginning, they can search by audio books and it just pulls up just audio books for them. Quizzes are the quizzes that can go along with different books and different practices. So here's world quizzes, education quizzes, and science and nature. So you can find those in there. Articles is a great resource as well because this can pull up articles that are related again to their interests or things that you're learning about in class and so they can read those articles as well. Now, new to Epic is Epic loads new and up to date books all the time to their library and so these are the new ones that they would load again that are related to the interest that they chose. They can come over here to the left and search anything they want and when they do that, it brings up different options of what they can search for. They can select search options and they can go here and say filter by AR level and then they select their level that they read at and then they can click search and then they can type in a topic and it will pull up those search parameters for the topic they chose. So I'm gonna go back to browse here. Now again, I mentioned as the students read, they earn badges and so I'm gonna show you just what a book would look like for a student. So they can open it up and they have all these options. It'll tell them that they have 26 pages to read or flip through. They can add it to their favorites. They can rate it after they're done reading. They can change the brightness. They can also flip to read this offline if they go home and don't have access to it but once they open the page, they get the title page and then they get it flipped through just like any e-book and read each page in the book. Now, when they get to the end, I love this about the Epic app because if they just keep flipping through those pages and they're not really reading it, the Epic app will say, you didn't spend enough time reading the book, there's no way you could have finished the book in that amount of time. So please go back and read the book. It won't allow them to finish it. It also gives them a list of other books that they might like that are related to this. But when they do click on finish the book, they are given the opportunity to rate the book and if they take time to do that, they can also earn badges that way. But then, all of this information is also recorded in your teacher dashboard so that's where you see the results there. Now, if I click on a word that I'm in, it will tell me the word. It will also give me definitions for the words right there as I'm reading. So if kids need help pronouncing words or even identifying words, it's right there for them as well. And again, they can add that to their favorites or whatever they wanna do. Now, that was just a regular e-book. Again, if I go and I look for an audio book or a read to me audio book, it will filter. And I'm gonna open one of those. It gives me the table of contents. And as you can see, you can underline words, you can magnify, however, you prefer to read an e-book. And that is pretty much it from the student perspective. Okay, so thanks for listening to this webinar today. And again, I wanna remind you, the presentation is available. If you go back to that bit.ly backslash make epic, you can, there's more information on there about what the teacher perspective looks like, some different things that you can do with epic and how your students can access it and things like that. And please don't forget to contact me. Me, if you have any questions, I'd love to help you out with getting this set up for your students. You can reach me at tina.souser at esu8ne.org.