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TESOL Ideas--
Useful Websites)
As I mentioned in the previous post, I discovered this while making images in Google Gemini, and it's very useful.
Basically, you give Google Gemini a command about a storybook you want to create, and it makes it for you.
I've found it very useful for creating graded readers in my class based around
CVC (consonant vowel consonant) sets.
It appears to have the usual positives and negatives of AI writing. On the positive side, it adhered reasonably well to the prompt I gave it. It had a coherent story, and it kept the illustrations for all the characters consistent throughout the story.
On the negative side, the story wasn't particularly interesting. Some of the words I gave it got used in awkward ways. The story was mostly (but not perfectly) graded to the level I wanted it. Et cetera.
I wish it was also easy to share these storybooks once they get created. It does give me a link to share, but it looks like it doesn't have any embedding features, so you can only access it from the link.
From my own account, I have the option to print out any storybooks that I make. I can also save my storybooks to PDFs (using the print function). But it looks like other people accessing the link don't have these same options.
The PDF or print version of the book isn't great either--Google doesn't do a good job of converting the storybook to printable paper.
But who knows how all of this will improve in the future. It looks like this is a brand new feature, so this is all early days right now. Maybe it will get a lot easier to share these creations in the future?
Another interesting feature is that Google Gemini creates a unique story each time. I gave it the same prompt ("create a story book for new readers based on these words: cat, sat, pat, mat, vat, bat, rat, fat, hat") in both my work Google account and my personal Google account, and it created two completely different storybooks for each.
This can be frustrating if you fall in love with a certain version, and then can't get Gemini to recreate it. (I actually prefer the Storybook that got created at my work account, but because of the restrictions on my Google account for work, I can't get a sharable link for that version.)
However, if you're trying to give students a lot of different practice with a certain vocabulary set, the advantages of this are that you can have Gemini create multiple stories based on the same vocabulary set. You could read one story on one day, and then the next day do a completely different story, but using the same vocabulary.
For example, I created a story using CVC -at words
here, and then created another story
here.
I created a story using CVC -ap words
here, and then another story
here.
I created a story using CVC -an words
here, and then another story
here.
The possibilities for creating classroom readers are endless!
A couple more notes:
* I can't seem to figure out if these storybooks created in Gemini count against my Google account data storage limit. (I am getting very close to hitting my 15 MB limit.) I've searched the web for an answer on this, but can't seem to find one.
I'm also not sure how long Gemini will keep these storybooks. I'm assuming they will save them indefinitely, but it's not really clear to me how my creations on Gemini are stored.
* If you click on the above links to the storybooks I created, you may notice that Gemini credits me as the author on the front page. I think this is a little bit patronizing. (I didn't write these books--AI did. I don't need to be credited as the author.) But that's the way the program works, I guess.
Update: So, just after publishing this post, I was fooling around with the above links to see if they worked, and unfortunately the bottom part of each page was missing. The full text was visible, but the bottoms of the picture got cut off. Which in some cases is unfortunate--e.g.
in this story, on the page that says "The cat sat on the mat", you can't actually see the mat in the picture.
I can still view the whole picture book on my end if I go back to Google Gemini, but I can't seem to get a good link to share it. Which is unfortunate. But apparently this is a new feature that is still in development, so maybe this bug will get better later on.
I've discovered I can also share a link to the Gemini conversation which created the storybook. For example, if you click on
this link here then you should be able to see the prompt that I entered, and the full illustrations that Gemini created for each page. But you can't flip the pages like you would in storybook mode.
2nd Update: Actually it looks like when I access the link on my phone (as opposed to my laptop) then I can see the full illustrations.
Another Update: October 9, 2025: After having used this feature a lot in the past few weeks, another frustration I have is that I can't edit the texts. There are some times when I'm relatively happy with the illustrations, but want to tinker with the text a bit. But you can't. I imagine (hope) that in the future Google will fix this so that you can do some light editing of the text if you want to improve it.
(TESOL Materials--Graded Readers) 
