[00:00:02]
Announcer: You’re listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. For hundreds of ideas, free experiments and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. And now, here’s your host, Ben Newsome.

[00:00:16]
Ben Newsome: It’s Family Book Form and we’re hanging out with the founder Carey Furze to find out what does Family Book Form do and how could you use this in a science context? Really briefly, it takes oral information—the stories, the things that people are saying—and creates a scaffold for kids to publish a real book. An actual page-turner. Kids making their own book around their science experiments could just be a really interesting hook that you could use with your science teaching. Let’s hang out with Carey Furze and find out all about it.

[00:00:47]
Announcer: This is the Fizzics Ed Podcast. For all about science, ed tech and more. To see 100 fun free experiments you can do with your class, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s physics spelt F-I-double-Z-I-C-S, and click 100 free experiments.

[00:01:46]
Carey Furze: I was a former English teacher a long time ago, but more recently I’ve had writing roles my whole life and a couple of books published. But what I tried to create was a way to document content easily. I wanted to create a template page that people could just speak into, they could invite other people to contribute content to it. It’s an evolution of Word or Google Docs that there’s a template page, so you follow prompts, you can follow the question prompts, you can interview people, and it’s just collecting content that’s important to you into a page and it automatically formats that content into a book.

[00:01:52]
Carey Furze: I wanted to capture all this information that gets lost because people can’t be bothered. I launched it as a memoir-creating tool for retirees and I was doing ‘save your story’ or ‘create your memoir’ workshops at libraries, and libraries would market to their communities to come to the library and create your memoir. The oldies consistently wanted to have the end book product, but they didn’t want to use technology and they were a bit nervous around it. But what they consistently said was that they wanted their grandchildren to ask them about their lives and talk to them.

[00:02:32]
Carey Furze: I thought, how do you get these kids to ask questions that they don’t really have the maturity to know to ask? Of course, they love their family, they love their grandparents, but often kids are busy with life and their parents are busy with life. Grandparents tend to be sidelined a little bit, and with communities being more isolated and dispersed, grandparents aren’t in grandchildren’s lives necessarily now. That was the genesis of getting grandchildren to interview their grandparents, and it grew from there and morphed into a product that is just a documentation tool to scaffold inquiry learning.

[00:03:17]
Carey Furze: Kids can interview anybody. Then it turns not just into biography as a service, but qualitative research. This is teaching kids about primary source content, going in and actually interviewing people. They have ways to personalise and differentiated ways to collect the content. They can use the speech-to-text, they can just write directly into the page, or they can invite other people to contribute into the page. I wanted it to be a resource that not only helped the students but helped the teachers as well. Teachers can just assign the book-creating link and students then can access all the functionality within that dashboard.

[00:04:01]
Carey Furze: Instead of teachers having to hold their hand the whole time and instruct on how to write a sentence or how to interview somebody or what to ask, the scaffolding was within the dashboard. It outsourced the instruction directly to the students within the dashboard, but also outsourced collaboration so that the parents and grandparents and communities were brought in to help instruct and help motivate those students as well. I was trying to outsource all of the work involved from the teacher to the community and to the families. Does that make sense?

[00:04:43]
Ben Newsome: It does. I can imagine how powerful this would be, especially on a large project. You think of all the different moving parts that are happening in projects, especially when you’ve got five kids, six kids, eight kids, or a whole class or more working on a thing. There’s a lot of stuff happening that I suspect gets dropped and just gets missed or no one had time to write it down. This sounds really useful.

[00:05:05]
Carey Furze: Yeah. Also, I know there’s a lot of collaboration within classes, trying to get kids to collaborate with each other, which is great. I was not wanting to compete with that or add to that. What I wanted was to have kids collaborate outside of the classroom, initially with their family because it’s a safe environment and it’s a fun project to interview Grandma about their life or the neighbour or someone like that. Getting these kids to go and collect content from outside, collaborating with other people, and then bring that content into the classroom.

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Carey Furze: You’re getting all these kids collaborating on and enjoying all this disparate content that comes from outside. Whether it’s a class where the teacher is teaching English and it’s biography or whether it’s social studies or history, the content that the kids have brought in, they can actually play the audio file of the interview that they’ve done with a migrant or with a minority person or a first responder or a veteran from the community. All the kids can enjoy the spoken story from a grandparent or another person.

[00:06:20]
Carey Furze: It’s real voice. Then they can collaboratively work on editing that content or formatting that content into the finished product or discussing, enriching the class lessons and discussing. It can be used by the teacher for an example in their explicit lesson, other than just using stale textbooks all the time.

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Ben Newsome: One of the things is that they’re creating their own textbooks. This is really cool because this is very much a science podcast, STEM podcast, and you often think about the usual things that get put out are my experiment report, what I did, or I did my podcast on the thing. But I remembered, and I was recounting a story just prior to hit record on this particular chat, about—I think I was in Year 2 or Year 3—but I remember being recently jealous of a class where the teacher actually organised the students’ work to get published, like in a hard-cover book published.

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Ben Newsome: You’re seven or eight years old and you’re looking at these kids walking around with a book with a hard cover with their own picture of themselves and they’re all happy. How did you do that? Books are this sacred object in the library and going, how on earth do you get on a page, let alone you’re in Year 2 or Year 3 and you’ve got a book!

[00:07:43]
Carey Furze: That’s right. This is part of the Universal Design Learning framework and it’s one of the components that is the how, what, why of learning. What motivates kids to be interested? It doesn’t matter if it’s a literacy project or whether it’s a STEM project. What engages kids to be interested? Having a polished book at the end that is a tangible example or reflection or collation of their learning, of their work, they’re very proud to present that.

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Carey Furze: There was an example just recently of a Year 7 boy at a Sydney high school that typically is a lower socio-economic school and the parents aren’t necessarily that well-educated, so education isn’t valued that much. These boys aren’t interested in reading and writing, they’re not interested in the English lessons. The teachers struggle to get them interested. They did a biography project where they interviewed someone of their choice. One of the boys, an illiterate boy who could barely string a sentence together, wrote a 100-page book because he was interested, and his family bought into it, the family were helping him.

[00:09:08]
Carey Furze: You get the whole family unit coming together in a fantastic activity, but the tangible product at the end is not only a reflection of the whole learning, but it’s valuable to that family. That kid feels very proud to present it.

[00:09:24]
Carey Furze: It can be monetised as well. Classes can do a collaborative recipe book. There’s been a popular project with the lockdown cookbook and all the kids are contributing to a class book their favourite recipe or what recipes they were cooking during lockdown, photos of them cooking and reflections on why that recipe is popular in their family. Then it comes down to culture and migration and religious values within families, and it’s all documented through food.

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Carey Furze: You can subversively get kids educated and interested through this backdoor gamification. Gamification has always been about distracting kids with bells and whistles and they’re learning without them even knowing it. But the problem with a lot of gamification technology is that it is all bells and whistles and there’s not much deep learning happening.

[00:10:25]
Carey Furze: Also that’s triggering brain hormones like dopamine and adrenaline which can then be a slippery slope to addiction. When the kids are actually talking with someone and they’re using communication skills and they’re bonding, whether it’s with their family or someone in the community, and they’re listening, all these fantastic communication skills that are going by the wayside now with kids doing everything online.

[00:10:52]
Carey Furze: They’re practising listening, they’re practising thinking about what they’re going to ask next, and that releases the oxytocin chemical in their brain. Which is the chemical that’s very positive for love and bonding and generating feelings of security and resilience and all of these great brain chemical effects.

[00:11:18]
Carey Furze: This is what I’ve tried to achieve with scaffolding these inquiry learning projects. I know this is a STEM podcast, so it doesn’t matter what you’re documenting, but getting the kids to actually articulate a question is a vital component of science and scientific research. What is the question? What is an important question to ask? Sometimes you have to inquire into the community—what is the problem here?

[00:11:46]
Carey Furze: You can identify a big question and then you can start engineering solutions. If you don’t ask the right questions in the first place, it doesn’t matter what skills you’ve got in engineering and critical analysis, you need to be understanding and having a broad perspective within a community and get lots of people’s feedback and input. What is the problem? Identify the problem before you start creating solutions.

[00:12:16]
Ben Newsome: I think it’s really powerful, especially when you think about what you describe with the Year 7 student, low literacy levels, and they’ve produced a 100-page book. That’s fantastic. I think about what happens in a scientific lesson, there’s some big words going on, a lot of stuff going on, but it might be hard to articulate with the written word, especially if the kid is illiterate to be able to write a thing, but the child might be able to describe it well. This is another way, another mode of communicating language.

[00:12:46]
Carey Furze: That’s right. Maybe another way to get girls interested, because girls are better communicators. This might be a way that girls become interested in science, because you get them to go and actually talk to people and interview people in a community and then they can identify what is a problem in this community or identify an issue in a certain geographic space, and then you can start addressing all the STEM science initiatives and technologies and vocabulary. You’ve already got the girls interested because they’ve bonded with the people. There’s usefulness there too.

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Ben Newsome: Absolutely. I’m actually just thinking, teachers love shaping their own lessons to be able to fit their own needs. It’s their classroom, not ours. I wonder, using this tool, can they insert their own questions, their own guiding questions to help the kids as a stimulus, or do they use the backbone that you’ve created?

[00:13:49]
Carey Furze: Both. The most basic version of this technology is that the teacher can send an automated link to a class of kids or up to 200 kids. Each student clicks on that link and they have a template page. Whatever the question is that the teacher is wanting them to respond to is on the left-hand side of that page. The student can see what the teacher wants. They can type content into that page, upload photos, and click submit and then all the students’ content is automatically formatted into a collaborative class book.

[00:14:30]
Carey Furze: But the ideal use of the tech, of what we created it for, was that the teacher would send the link to each student and they would create their own book themselves. The student has got the dashboard and within that dashboard are different template pages and question prompts. They can turn those questions off if they want to, but it doesn’t matter because the questions don’t appear in the book. Only what they type into the answer box or speak into the answer box.

[00:15:00]
Carey Furze: The business is called Book Form, now it’s called Family Book Form, but the idea was that creating a book is as easy as filling in a form. There’s a question prompt and an answer box. Whatever is inputted into that answer box is what is automatically formatted into the book. The students can ask their own questions, use the questions as a prompt, there’s topic prompts, and they can go through the different topics and choose what topics are more appropriate to ask somebody. But yes, it’s just a prompt, it doesn’t appear in the book. The kids can ask whatever they want.

[00:15:41]
Ben Newsome: Awesome. Clearly you’re passionate about this, just a little bit. What kicked that passion off?

[00:15:49]
Carey Furze: Oh goodness, that is a big question. I thought technology is fantastic, it’s leveraging technology for a difficult task. Just like the Egyptians built pyramids and it wasn’t the aliens that came down and helped them, it was them leveraging a lot of people and leveraging weights and using science to actually build the pyramid. It’s possible with a number of people and leveraging. I wanted students to use technology as a tool to leverage what they’re already doing.

[00:16:30]
Carey Furze: Teachers are already getting kids to read something, watch a video, go and do something, and then write about it. That limits kids because they have to type into a blank page or they need a lot of instruction from the teacher of how to structure it, how to format it, what passions do I have, what do I want to write about. There’s a lot of time spent with that. It’s unnecessary time, I think.

[00:17:00]
Carey Furze: If you use technology as a tool and all the scaffolding and the instruction is within the dashboard, the kid has different ways of collecting the content and, maybe if they’re dyslexic kids, their typing isn’t that great, they can just speak into the page. Or they can interview someone in another language. Maybe grandparents or someone in the community speaks a different language from that student. They can use technology to record the spoken answer and they can translate it, transcribe it directly into their page. That’s a great use of leveraging technology for good, isn’t it?

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Ben Newsome: Absolutely. As a parent, my kids bring back their assignments, they might show what they’ve done in their exercise book or maybe a video they’ve done. I tell you what, I’d be pretty impressed if they go thud. Here’s my book, Dad. You wrote a book? That’s really cool. How chuffed would that child be saying I’ve written a real book?

[00:18:07]
Carey Furze: Absolutely. We did this project with Year 9 kids where they went into an aged care business. The aged care business bought the technology licences, the book-creating licences, and donated it to the school. Each student was matched with a resident and went to the aged care once a week and interviewed their resident for an hour and they just followed the prompts and sometimes they created their own questions, sometimes they went off-topic.

[00:18:34]
Carey Furze: At the end of that, they had created a memoir or biography on their person and they were so proud to present that. Those book presentation ceremonies at the end of the project had hundreds of families there, the residents’ families, the students’ families, everyone crying and laughing. They were just so impressed with what the kids had created. The kids actually hadn’t done that much because that’s what technology is good at doing, it automates formatting, it automates creating a polished book product.

[00:19:07]
Carey Furze: They were very pleased with what they had managed to achieve. And it’s valuable. Those residents’ families bought the books as well. There’s opportunities for schools to raise money using this technology, because if they’re creating favourite recipe books in the community or biographies as a service or qualitative research on first responders or veterans, whoever’s important or documenting bushfires in their regions, that’s valuable.

[00:19:44]
Carey Furze: Families want to buy that product at the end or communities want to buy it. It’s not just some school kid’s project that only Mum loves, the whole community potentially really values that primary source research.

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Ben Newsome: One of the things that comes up, I’m involved in quite a few chats around artificial intelligence and where it’s useful in a school and where it might be positive or a negative effect. I wonder, have you had the feedback going, what about our high-achieving students? Does the formatting, all that stuff being done for them, does that impinge upon their learning, or are they leveraging technology in a way that we want to do as adults in the first place? I’m curious, what are your thoughts around that?

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Carey Furze: We specifically created this as not a design product. The competitor book-creating technologies are Book Creator and Google Slides and even Word has products, Apple has a book-creating product. Their main focus is always around design and so kids spend a lot of time and get very distracted with changing fonts and changing colours and it takes away from the actual content of what they’re writing about. It doesn’t become a written work or a scientific work or a primary source documentation; it becomes an art project.

[00:21:02]
Carey Furze: Although I do try and push STEAM rather than just STEM, I think there does need to be an art and creativity component, but ours is the structure of the book is automated and prompts for questions to help ask questions. It’s to get the kids focused on the actual content and to be asking the right questions and to be critically analysing the answers and then to reflect back on all the content that you’ve collected from a dispersed group of people. That is the focus, not design. That was what we tried to create.

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Ben Newsome: That makes sense. You think of all the epic novels that have been created over the years, the huge books, the literature, the ones that people are always referring to, there’s not many design aspects there, they’re just words on a page. Just constructed incredibly well.

[00:21:58]
Carey Furze: Yeah. You’ve got to get the kids used to looking at text on a page. It’s not about cartoons and animation and GIFs. There are places for that, platforms that they go to for that, but they do have to become used to looking at masses of blocks of text and being engaged with it and being able to read it and be able to analyse it and broaden their vocabulary.

[00:22:31]
Carey Furze: It’s just trying to get them exposed to it in a soft, nice, comfortable, exciting way before they just have blocks and blocks of text that they’ve got to look at and analyse and they don’t care and they have no attachment to the text, whether it’s Shakespeare or some dry poet. It’s hard to get kids interested in text they’re not interested in.

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Ben Newsome: Yeah. It begs the question, if I had a group of 30 students, let’s say they’re about middle school age, and I want this piece of content created at the end of a six-week, eight-week, ten-week, 12-week process, whatever the project is about. What are the first steps to get the kids ready to know what’s about to come up and so they make the most use of the technology that’s in front of them?

[00:23:28]
Carey Furze: How would they normally document it? They’d normally document it in a workbook, maybe a HyperDoc, Google Slide, or a blank page. With our template page, the teacher just sends an automated link to all of the students and those students open their template page. They’ve got the question on the side and they can write directly into that page. They can log in and out over a six-week, eight-week term.

[00:23:57]
Carey Furze: They can keep documenting whether they’re using it as a journal to document their journey, whether they’re using it to collect content into that page of other research that they’re doing. They’re just documenting it straight into that page. They can upload photos and then at the end or whenever the deadline is, they can submit it. Not until they have submitted can the teacher see it. The students can edit their content up until they submit, and once it’s submitted, it’s in the teacher’s collaborative class book.

[00:24:29]
Carey Furze: The teacher can then edit it, reformat it if they want. It’s just a collation into a polished book product of all the students’ work. The teachers wouldn’t be using this for every project, there’s some projects it’s not appropriate for. But teachers have used it for Mother’s Day books or Grandparents’ Day books, for example, where kids are doing a poem and maybe a photo or a painting of their mother and they submit that and it creates all the students’ poems and artwork within a book and it’s a nice little gift to the parents.

[00:25:05]
Carey Furze: It’s the same for the recipe book, for example. Each student documents their favourite recipe, some photos of them cooking, they submit and it automatically creates the class collaborative recipe book. They can showcase that on the smartboard in the classroom, they can discuss it, talk about migration, talk about the science of cooking if that’s one of the lessons, but they can use their content for whatever the lesson is. That’s what collaborative books can be all about.

[00:25:38]
Carey Furze: And the other ones are if the students are going and collecting their own content, they’re bringing brand-new fresh authentic voice into the class and that’s super interesting, it gets kids really interested and engaged and involved.

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Ben Newsome: Ultimately, it’s about authentic voice, right? These are the kids’ own words. That’s the whole point. The fact that it’s speech-to-text really means that the chance of there being plagiarism is pretty low because that’s what they said during a real interview.

[00:26:07]
Carey Furze: That’s right. Exactly. Which is really important. Absolutely.

[00:26:10]
Ben Newsome: Carey, there’ll be people listening in just going, this is interesting. Where do I find this stuff? Where do I go?

[00:26:18]
Carey Furze: Yes, I’m glad you asked. It’s familybookform.com. Any teacher can sign up for free and then you have access to one free book-creating dashboard. That’s where you could create your free collaborative book and some good examples during COVID were teachers sending the automated link to their class of students and asking the question, how has COVID affected you? All the kids documented what they were doing and how they were coping, uploaded photos of their workspaces at home, and that automatically created the Covid and Me collaborative class book.

[00:26:54]
Carey Furze: Teachers can create those sort of books or they can create a class recipe book, that’s a free book-creating demo book that the teachers can do and then you can see all the functionality of what the students would see. From there you can add a project, it’s $10 for a book-creating licence per student, and that is available for a year. Instead of doing a Microsoft subscription and you can have unlimited blank pages for a year, this is a book-creating licence, creates one book, whether the teacher creates it or the student creates it. Just go to familybookform.com.

[00:27:32]
Ben Newsome: Thanks so much Carey. This has been a really fascinating chat and it’s certainly an area that—I think about all the project-based learning things that are happening in classrooms around the globe these days. It is a big deal. I think about the central question, which is how many things get lost? Don’t get documented throughout that process. This is a real opportunity to pick some of those pieces up.

[00:27:52]
Carey Furze: Absolutely, I hope so. We’re a Google for Education partner and we comply with all the student privacy and data storage requirements. We’re always looking for case studies. If you want to showcase what project you’ve documented in your community, let us know, we’d love to showcase it. We’ve got a monthly book-creating cash prize every month, it’s $100. We get prizes from other businesses donating different laptops and different technology. Check it out on the website and have a look at other example case studies on our website.

[00:28:29]
Ben Newsome: Awesome. Thanks so much Carey for hanging on this podcast, it’s been awesome chatting with you.

[00:28:33]
Carey Furze: Thank you Ben, see you.

[00:28:35]
Announcer: This is the Fizzics Ed Podcast. We’re excited about science. Grab a copy of our new book, Be Amazing: How to Teach Science the Way Primary Kids Love, from our website. Just search Be Amazing book. It’s available in hard copy and eBook. Go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s physics spelt F-I-double-Z-I-C-S.

[00:28:58]
Ben Newsome: There we go, we just hung out with Carey Furze, who is the founder of Family Book Form. If you want to find out a little bit more about what Family Book Form can do with your classroom, head on over to their website, familybookform.com. Really easy to get started and it’s all about creating speech-to-text that can really make a difference when it comes to kids’ understanding about their subject and maybe publish about what they’ve been doing. Really handy. That is enough for this particular episode. I hope you’ve enjoyed this. You’ve been hanging out with me, Ben Newsome from Fizzics Education. This is the Fizzics Ed Podcast and I’ll catch you another time.

[00:29:32]
Announcer: You’ve been listening to another Fizzics Ed Podcast. We’re excited about science. Subscribe to us on iTunes to download the next episode as soon as it’s released. And don’t forget, for hundreds of ideas, free experiments, our new Be Amazing book and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s physics spelt F-I-double-Z-I-C-S.

[00:30:00]
Announcer: This podcast is part of the Australian Educators Online Network. aeon.net.au.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Family Book Form support students with low literacy levels?

The platform utilises speech-to-text technology, allowing students who may struggle with traditional writing or have conditions like dyslexia to articulate their thoughts orally. This shifts the focus from the mechanics of writing to the quality of ideas and storytelling, enabling students to produce comprehensive works, such as the 100-page book mentioned in the episode, that reflect their true capability.

Can teachers customise the questions within the book templates?

Yes. While the platform provides a backbone of scaffolded prompts and question sets, teachers have the flexibility to insert their own specific guiding questions. This allows the tool to be adapted for diverse subjects ranging from science experiment reports to historical biographies or community recipe books.

Is the platform strictly for English or History classes?

Not at all. In a STEM context, it can be used to document the scientific inquiry process, interview community members to identify real-world problems for engineering solutions, or create collaborative journals of long-term science projects. It serves as a tool for qualitative research and authentic documentation across all learning areas.

How does the collaboration feature work outside of the classroom?

Students can invite contributors, such as parents or grandparents, to add content directly to their book dashboard. This facilitates a ‘back-door’ approach to education where families become active participants in the student’s learning journey, helping to capture primary source information that might otherwise be lost.

What is the pricing model for schools and educators?

Teachers can sign up for free to access a demo dashboard and create a collaborative class book. For individual student projects, the platform offers book-creating licences for approximately $10 per student, which remain valid for one year, allowing for the publication of a professional-standard book.

Extra thought ideas to consider

The Biochemistry of Learning: Oxytocin vs Dopamine

Carey highlights a shift from typical gamification—which often relies on dopamine hits that can lead to addictive behaviours—toward activities that release oxytocin. By focusing on listening, bonding, and meaningful human connection through interviews, the platform helps build resilience and security in students while they learn.

Identifying the Problem Before the Solution

In science and engineering, asking the right question is critical. Using a tool like this to conduct community-based qualitative research helps students identify actual needs within their geographic space. This ensures that their subsequent STEM projects are grounded in authentic problem-solving rather than abstract theory.

Discussion points summarised from the FizzicsEd Podcast, verified and edited by Ben Newsome CF