A librarian toolkit for getting Book Creator off the ground this year

Every fall, a librarian ends up doing the same thing: piecing together a certification link, a lesson plan someone shared in a Facebook group, and a portfolio template from last year’s AASL session, all so the rest of the building has one clean place to start. By the time it’s assembled, half of it is out of date, and explaining why any of it matters to a principal takes another conversation you didn’t have time for.

Consider this your toolkit for Book Creator, kept current and kept in one place. It covers certification, the resources worth handing to staff this year, and the one asset built specifically to help you prove what your library already does, organized so you can point different teachers to different sections instead of forwarding one overwhelming email in September and hoping something sticks.

Book Creator gives students a way to combine writing, voice, images, and video to show what they know, in any subject, at any grade level. For a library media specialist, that matters because your role already spans every subject and grade in the building. A tool that only works inside one class or one curriculum area does not fit how you actually work.

Start with certification

Certification is the fastest way to move from curious to confident, and it lives inside Book Creator itself, so you can work through it without leaving the tool or waiting on a separate PD day.

Get certified

Once you’re certified, the Kami Learning Center is where you and your staff go to keep learning on your own schedule. It’s organized by product, with short videos covering the tools teachers ask about most. Point new staff here in their first week, and point returning staff here whenever a feature update comes through.

Run a PD session without building it from scratch

If you’re the one leading a staff PD day or a lunch and learn this year, the Book Creator PD Guide 2026 is built for exactly that. It’s a remixable guide for facilitators running a “getting started with Book Creator” session, with recommendations from Book Creator’s own Teacher Success Managers and Ambassadors.

Why we love it: it’s session-ready as is, so a 30-minute lunch and learn or a longer staff PD block comes from one remix instead of an afternoon spent building slides.

Prove your library’s impact

This is the piece built specifically for you, not for the teachers you’re training, and it’s worth leading with because it answers the question AASL’s second-edition standards are putting in front of every library program this year: can you show your impact, in language a principal or board will accept, not just describe it.

The Future Ready Librarian annual report portfolio is a remixable template built around Framework 3.0’s advocacy language. Instead of reconstructing a year of program impact from memory in May, you and your students build the record as the year happens.

Why we love it: it is the one resource on this list built for you specifically, not for the teachers you’re training. Remix it once at the start of the year and you have a running record instead of a scramble at report time.

Resources to build your first unit

Once certification and the portfolio are underway, these are the ones worth handing to staff, matched to what they’re already trying to do.

• Getting started with school library lesson plans: includes the Digital Norms Notebook for elementary and secondary classrooms and the Portrait of an AI-Ready Graduate template, a starting point for the AI literacy conversations landing on libraries faster than policy can keep up.
• Author study activities: a webinar and remixable author studies book built by a librarian, for librarians. Good for staff who want to see the format in action before trying it themselves.
• Digital citizenship for students: the ISTE Digital Explorers companion books, useful for the digital literacy and information evaluation work that’s landed on the library well ahead of any formal curriculum catching up.
• Reading response journals built with Epic! and reading response journals built with Sora: ready-made templates if your library already uses either platform for independent reading.

Send teachers the one or two that match a real need on your staff right now. Nobody needs the whole list in the first week.

Accessibility resources for your technology director

Accessibility has become a procurement question. You’re increasingly the one a technology director asks whether a resource conforms, even though answering that was never part of the job description.

• Book Creator supports UDL: a one-page flyer mapping Book Creator’s multimodal tools to Universal Design for Learning, built to forward directly to whoever handles conformance review.
• Book Creator for multilingual learners: the same, focused on the features that matter most for multilingual learners, including translated comments and speech to text in more than 120 languages.

These are worth sharing with any teacher building a more inclusive classroom, not just special education staff.

If you’re comparing tools

If your library or district already uses another platform for student creation, the Book Creator vs. Seesaw comparison walks through where each tool fits, including where Seesaw is still the better call. Worth a read before a selection committee meeting, not after.

The rest of the Kami family, if it’s useful to know

Book Creator is the centerpiece of this toolkit, but it’s part of a larger family, and it’s worth knowing what the other two do in case a teacher or administrator asks what else is available under the same account.

• Kami App helps teachers bring lessons to life, turning everyday materials into interactive learning experiences where they can guide instruction, ask questions, and see student thinking in real time. If your building already collaborates with you on annotated research or close-reading work, this is often already sitting in a teacher’s toolkit alongside Book Creator.
• Kami Companion makes web-based learning accessible so more students can participate independently, with built-in reading, language, and expression supports across online content and curriculum. Worth knowing about if you’re already fielding accessibility or multilingual learner questions this year, since it answers a version of that question outside of what Book Creator covers.

You don’t need to be the one rolling either of these out. But when a teacher or your technology director asks what else is in the Kami family, having the answer positions you as someone who sees the fuller picture of what’s already available in the building, not just the one tool you use yourself.

How to roll this out without carrying it alone

Nobody needs all of this in the first week of school. Certification and the Learning Center are the two things worth surfacing to every teacher up front, since they’re built to be revisited all year. Everything else works better sent in smaller batches: the accessibility flyers to teachers building out IEP supports this fall, the author study resources to whoever runs a literacy unit, the portfolio template to yourself, first, so it’s already running by the time anyone asks to see it.

It also helps to name a point person or two early, teachers or specialists who go through certification alongside you and can answer quick questions before they become a help desk ticket. ISTE’s guide to building a successful edtech coaching program makes a similar case for any rollout: it succeeds less on the volume of resources shared and more on the relationships and trust built around using them. That’s true even when you’re not officially the building’s tech lead, which most library media specialists aren’t, regardless of how often the AI and digital literacy questions land on your desk anyway.

If a principal or technology director asks why the time investment in certification is worth it, it helps to have the numbers on hand. Book Creator is UDL certified, has been used to create over 200 million books, and Kami is active in 92% of US K-12 public schools. Neither number does the advocacy work for you, but they’re useful shorthand for anyone who wants reassurance that the tool is stable and widely trusted before signing off on a schoolwide rollout.

Where to start with your librarian toolkit for Kami

If you do nothing else this week, get certified and remix the portfolio template so it’s collecting evidence from day one. Then pick one resource above that matches a real need on your staff right now, an author study, a reading response journal, an accessibility flyer for a colleague building IEP supports, and share just that one. The rest of this list will still be here when you need it.