BoomWriter has two types of book competition: “Group” and “Open”. The end result of both is the same - a fantastic story written by your students! But you may be wondering which is the best one for you to choose?

Group Book

A Group book works with a set group of students established by a teacher. This could be a particular group of students, an individual class or section, a group of classes, or even an after school program. This means that you can control which students can submit a chapter. You can also add and remove students as the competition progresses.

Group books are ideal for when you need to restrict participation to a set group of students. For example, you could run a Group book for just the students in one of your classes to help you cover a particular topic, genre or skill. You could even split a class into teams and have each collaborate to create a book. Equally, Group books can be useful outside of the classroom. After school clubs can use the Group book option to ensure that only members of the club can take part in the writing process.

Open Book Competition

An Open book competition is open to any student in your school who is in the specific grade conducting the competition. This means that as long as the student is in your school and is in the right grade, they can submit a chapter.  Open books can be great for grade-level projects or extra credit, or for clubs that span an entire school grade level. In fact, some of our members have indicated that they like to open their competitions to anyone. The book may be a single class’s project, but they don’t wish to exclude other students in their school and grade from the fun.

It’s your choice

We like to provide flexibility at BoomWriter (while still providing teachers enough control to make them comfortable). The more flexible it is, the more exciting uses can be found for it. We always advise our teachers to identify and use the type of book that best suits their need or outlook. Ask yourself, “Do I need to restrict participation to a specific group of students?” If this is in fact the case, then a Group book is probably the better option.