A short story about how Book Creator is still available through Kami, and how the two complement each other in a learning cycle to enhance your lessons. PLUS why Kami is more than just a PDF annotation tool.
Guest post (NOT sponsored) from Dan Kemp, Senior Brand & Content Marketing Manager at Kami. Dan led marketing at Book Creator from 2013 until joining Kami in 2025.
Chapter 1: An Honest Conversation
I’ve known Alice Keeler a number of years.
She has been a big supporter of Book Creator and she’s someone whose judgment I’ve trusted in the past – when she gives advice, I tend to listen.
So when I told her last year about how Book Creator had just been bought by Kami, I was very intrigued to know how she’d respond.
She was skeptical… to say the least.
In fact, her WhatsApp message said: “I don’t see how that works. 🤷♀️”
So – brutal honesty from Alice – just as I’d expected!
Nearly 12 months passed before I reached out to Alice again.
In the transition from Book Creator to Kami my role changed and I found myself responsible for Brand Management – trusted to preserve the Book Creator brand and tell a new story about how Book Creator is now part of the Kami family – Kami, Kami Companion, Kami Coach and Book Creator.
I feel like we’re in a good place to tell that story now. And Alice invited me to share it here.
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Chapter 2: Using the SAMR model
So let’s start by addressing that doubt – why didn’t Alice see the connection between Book Creator and Kami?
Well, if you’ve followed Alice at all, you’ll know that she is a huge proponent of the SAMR model in teaching.
In her post, Beyond Substitution: Elevating Learning with Book Creator, Alice said:
“Book Creator is more than just a digital tool; it’s a platform that transforms students from passive recipients of information to active creators.”
Substitution → Augmentation → Modification → Redefinition. SAMR.
This is important because in a world where there is pressure to reduce screen time, and get really intentional about our use of technology, this is an excellent framework for judging whether or not we are doing that.
Alice says this:
“As a versatile tool, Book Creator allows students to create their own multimedia-rich books, fostering creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication – the essential 4 C’s in modern education.”
That’s how she feels about Book Creator.
But how does she feel about Kami?
Chapter 3: A little backstory
Well, to quote another WhatsApp message she sent to me:
“Writing on PDFs is a sh***y reason to use tech.”
(More brutal honesty, thank you Alice).
And you know what, she’s not wrong, is she?
Simply replacing paper worksheets with a digital PDF version would be basic ‘substitution’ in the SAMR model, and not an effective use of screen time.
So that begs the question – why does Alice think using Kami is just writing on PDFs?
Well, there is a good reason for that.
Let me take you back a few years to the COVID-19 lockdowns. (Sorry).
Teachers were scrambling around to find ways to teach remotely and Kami was the perfect solution to get kids working online quickly.
We made Kami available for free. Kami was thrust into the public consciousness and rocketed from 3 million to 20 million users overnight.
We had to have literally everyone in the company answering support tickets!
Now, for better or worse, a lot of teachers used Kami in the most basic way – upload a PDF, get their students to read it and maybe answer some questions by writing on the PDF. Job done.
After COVID, Kami continued to grow and develop – adding new features, working closely with schools and districts to identify solutions to real problems classrooms were facing.
But the perception of what Kami is did not evolve alongside those product developments.
If you thought Kami was only good for PDF annotation, I’d invite you to look again.
Chapter 4: Kami and the SAMR model
The thing about SAMR is that it’s not really about the tool you use. It’s about the task you have students do.
Let’s look at how Kami can be viewed through the SAMR model, when the task is designed well…
Substitution. A worksheet on a screen instead of on paper. Alice is right about this one. On its own, it isn’t a good enough reason to hand a child a laptop.
Augmentation. Now that same worksheet reads itself aloud. It translates into a student’s home language. The font switches to OpenDyslexic or Lexend. A student who couldn’t access the task on paper can now access it without a different worksheet, a different room, or an adult sitting alongside them.
Modification. Here the task itself starts to change shape. Instead of writing an answer, a student records their voice explaining how they got there. Instead of collecting the work in and marking it that evening, the teacher watches thinking happen in Class View and steps in during the lesson, right in the moment.
Redefinition. And then there’s work that simply couldn’t exist without the technology at all. Which, as it happens, is exactly where Alice put Book Creator two years ago. Students moving from passive recipients of information to active creators. Multimedia books, made for a real audience, in any subject.
Kami and Book Creator, in the same product family, now work together in a learning cycle.
They are different halves of the same lesson.
Let’s look at an example.
Take a fifth grade lesson on adding fractions.
You have to use the district-approved PDF worksheet. So you upload it to Kami and the ones who need it get the text read aloud, or translated, or set in OpenDyslexic.
In Class View, the teacher spots four students adding the denominators straight across.
1/2 + 1/3 = 2/5.
The teacher gets to address the problem right away, not in the marking pile at 9pm.
That’s the Kami half of the lesson: thinking made visible. You can fix the misconception while it’s still fixable.
Then open Book Creator. Students make a comic book teaching next year’s class how to add fractions, narrated in their own voice.
You find out if the kids understand what they’ve learned as you hear them explain their thinking.
That’s an excellent reason to use tech.
Epilogue: And why should you care?
Thanks for reading this far.
It might be you hadn’t even heard of Book Creator or Kami before reading this.
You might be wondering why you should care about any of this.
Well… here are a few high-level reasons:
- Districts are being asked to show learning impact more clearly.
- Teachers are supporting a wider range of needs in the same classroom.
- Budgets are tighter.
- Technology stacks are under more scrutiny.
- AI is raising new questions about authenticity, integrity, and what real evidence of learning looks like.
I just want to get the message across that after 13 years of working in edtech, the landscape has changed.
There are flashy AI products and huge corporate LMSs out there that will gladly profit from the rise in technology in education.
And there are teams like the ones behind Kami and Book Creator that truly, definitively care about making a difference in education.
(Aside – did you know over a third of all the employees across Kami are former educators?).
You can trust us because we have stood the test of time, building products and communities from scratch that serve students and teachers first and foremost. And that recognition has come from trusted sources – ISTE Seal, ESSA III verification, Cast UDL Certification and more.
If you’d like to learn more about Kami, Book Creator, and our newer products Kami Companion (accessibility tool) and Kami Coach (AI math coach), I’d invite you to take a look at the Discover Kami hub I created to answer all your questions.
