Managing Apps

Control which Apps your teachers and students can use.

Dan Amos avatar
Written by Dan Amos
Updated over a week ago

Your teachers have access to an App Store within the Book Creator Teacher Dashboard where they can choose to enable additional apps for their own use and optionally their students.

Administrators can use the Admin Dashboard to set the permissions for each App and prevent students or both teachers and students from using an App if, for example, the App does not meet your District's privacy requirements.

Navigate to Settings / Manage Apps

For each App you can see a privacy summary under See details and choose from the following permissions:

  • Teachers and students - teachers can enable the App for their own use, and they can choose to enable it for student access in specific libraries.

  • Teachers only - teachers can enable the App for their own use, but they cannot enable it for their students

  • Disabled for everyone - neither teachers or students can use the App.

Apps and Privacy

Apps enrich Book Creator with great 3rd party content and features but they do bring additional privacy concerns that schools and districts will need to evaluate. We have provided 3 rings of safety around your use of these Apps.

  1. We have built the App integrations to minimise data flows, ensuring we proxy as much traffic through our servers as possible so that the Apps cannot track your usage. For example with Giphy the only data passed to Giphy is the text you use to search. Your IP address, location, cookies etc are all hidden when the GIFs are loaded as we proxy all the requests through our servers. Using these Apps through Book Creator is likely to be much safer than their normal use on the internet.

  2. Apps are not available to students unless their teacher chooses to enable student access. Teachers can also choose to enable selectively just for students in some libraries eg. based on age. We also provide teachers with summary App Privacy details to review before they enable an App.

  3. Administrators can elect to disable Apps completely through the Admin Dashboard.

For more details on the steps we have taken to keep your data safe please refer to this Twitter thread from our VP of Engineering, Thom Leggett.

What happens when I disable an App?

When an App has been disabled if will no longer be accessible in the Book Creator App Store.

Furthermore if the App had already been enabled by a teacher they will receive a message the next time they (or their students) try to use it.

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