Students paid to learn

Every student a published qualitative researcher

New Edutech scaffolds & documents student’s qualitative research into published books, developing 21st century skills and transformational learning, funded by communities.

The FamilyBookform dashboard empowers Students to speak into the page, interview others & collaborate, using question prompts, speech-to-text in any language, and all content is automatically formatted into digital books to share online, print on demand & sell.

FamilyBookform enhances existing writing assignments with STEAM pedagogy and Universal Design Learning frameworks to personalize & differentiate how, what & why students write. Ensuring local curriculum objectives and global ISTE standards are achieved.

The 'Communication for Connection' activities generate oxytocin for feelings of trust, security & developing resilience. Students’ content enriches lessons & develops the 4Cs of Critical thinking, Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, plus Social Emotional Intelligence.

Qualitative Research:

Qualitative research involves collecting and analyzing non-numerical data e.g., text, images, or audio, to understand concepts, opinions, or experiences. It can be used to gather in-depth insights into a problem or generate new ideas for research. 

Similar to STEM, Entrepreneurial or business units where students research, identify & analyze a problem, then engineer a solution that can be monetized & delivered at scale, the FamilyBookform technology enables every student to go into their community and generate original qualitative research - there are many businesses, grants and government funding that pay for this valuable data. 

Example: Students create valuable qualitative research on how the Covid-19 pandemic affected their communities. Teachers said, “the students were much more conscientious with their writing, because they knew their primary-source information would be valuable historical data for future generations, they felt very responsible to do a good job.”

Covid-19 & Me

My Family’s Pandemic Stories

Community Service

Students have been visiting elders in their communities for years, for socializing or giving singing & dancing performances. We know how beneficial these intergenerational visits are for everyone’s emotional & physical health. Now, using the FamilyBookform technology, students can capture those interactions and document them into published Memoirs or oral history books, and sell to those communities. Technology enhances those original activities from 'nice to those people at that time & place', into polished books that can be celebrated by many, now and into the future.

Students offer this Memoir service to various communities; palliative care, disabled people, immigrants, and minority groups - giving voice to previously unheard peoples, perspectives & experiences. Interviews can even be done online, helpful in the current pandemic environment. 

5 min TV - during project.

5 min TV - after project.

Gamification and STEAM writing:

STEM education is the integration of scientific methods & pedagogy, in which students investigate and engineer solutions to problems, and construct evidence-based explanations of real-world phenomena. ‘A’ for Arts or humanities adds creativity & a human-relevant lens when investigating problems & solutions.

The FamilyBookform dashboard guides students to investigate, collect primary-source content and critically analyze that content to identify problems, solutions and create new knowledge of value for authentic audiences.

Writing technology hasn’t changed very much over the years, it’s still students typing onto a blank page or templates teachers create. Teachers spend a lot of time getting students to be interested in reading & writing, suggesting topics to write about, text books to analyze, or maybe videos to watch & write a report or research paper. 

Students never need any help when playing online games do they? All the instructions are in the dashboard & they're interested because it's fun. That’s what our dashboard does, it guides students to collect personal content and that agency & personalization generates an interest in learning & writing. 

Plus, families really want the end book product, because it's personal & precious, so the whole family & community are motivating students to do a good job and finish - and they buy the books.

Student Journals

Improved Boys’ literacy research

Favorite Recipes Book

My Hero’s Memoir

Education at scale - Micro-credentials:

Education is changing from mass delivery of content & exams to personalized learning and proof of that learning in micro-credentials, portfolios & experience. Although technology is a great way to deliver content at scale, it does not guarantee that students engage, understand or complete the work. “In fact, research shows that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have high dropout rates & questionable quality.”

What skills are important for the future anyway? Communication has been identified as the single biggest contributing factor to a person’s health, wealth and success in relationships, career & life. Big companies and recruitment agencies are listing ‘Communication skills’ (soft skills) as more important now than technical skills or degrees. “It doesn’t matter how clever candidates are or where they went to school, if they can’t articulate their knowledge & ideas, collaborate with others, or mitigate conflict with empathy & EQ, then they have very limited value.”

Research on increasing youth mental ill-health & societies fracturing into extremism (see ‘Generation Me’ by Jean Twenge and ‘The Lonely Century’ by Noreena Hertz), the village is no longer raising the child. We are living a lot of our daily hours inside our heads and not physically & mentally out in the ‘real’ world. 

‘Communication for connection’ projects that scaffold not just young people, but their parents, extended families and the community at large are an efficient, scalable solution to building vital relationships, communication skills, empathy and authentic worldviews. 

We're a Google for Education Partner, integrated into the Classroom platform, available on Chromebooks & any device connected to WiFi. Comply with all student privacy & data storage requirements. Opportunities to advocate for incentives & present case studies & new research globally. Case studies, lesson plans, explainer videos are on the website.

Currently the digital content is collated into books, but soon there will be options to create authentic avatars, so in Virtual Reality (VR) we’ll be able to engage with anyone - forever.

More information: https://familybookform.com/