Showing posts with label authorship. Show all posts

Hack Your Student's Textbook- #Macul13 sessions on iBooks Author

By Unknown | Published Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Over 4000 people from across the midwest will descend upon Cobo Hall in Detroit, MI over the next few days to attend Macul13. Undoubtedly they will hear dynamic keynotes, learn about cool apps, and get a peek into top edtech teachers classrooms. And, while there are a plethora of excellent sessions to attend, I want to recommend a few "must see" sessions for those of us in an iPad teaching and learning environment.

Your students next textbook is written by YOU.

The sessions highlighted below pertain to using iBooks Author to create interactive learning modules (think units of a textbook). All are put on by excellent trainers, most of which, will be apart of this summer's iBooks Author Hackathon--a collaborative effort to create K-12 interactive learning mods. Check these sessions out during Macul, they will get you motivated to hack your students next textbook.

Thursday March 21

iBooks Author For Creating Interactive Books for an iPad - Workshop

1:00-3:00 pm W2-70 By: Dave Tchozewski

Dave Tchozewski +Dave Tchozewski is the Director of Information Technology for Jenison Public Schools and has a real heart for innovating the classroom. He will be running this two hour workshop to give teachers hands on experience with using this fascinating tool.

iBooks Author- Creating iPad Content for Education

4:00-5:00pm O3-45 By: Joanna Montgomery

Joanna is an expert in iBooks Author and did our training for us at Zeeland Public Schools last summer. She also works for Apple and serves as the DE for the east side of Michigan. Joanna will have you hooked on creating iBooks for sure.

Friday March 22

Innovating with iBooks Author and Pages

8:30-9:30 am D3-17 By: Steve Dickie +Steve Dickie

Steve is an incredibly creative and innovative science teacher who is partly responsible for this summers iBooks Author hackathon. He has incredible knowledge of the ins and outs of iBA and is looking forward to leading the east side of the state to author high quality content.

Join the iBooks Author Collaborative

11:30-12:30 pm DO-01A By: Anthony DiLaura +Anthony DiLaura & Steve Dickie +Steve Dickie

This is my session, so of course I think you should attend :) Steve and I are hoping to share with you the plans for this summer's collaborative project that is already spreading across the Midwest. Teachers from all over are coming together to create interactive textbooks. If you teach in an iPad environment you should be here as this is the future of teaching and learning!

iPads, iBooks Author, Screencasts, Edmodo & More: New Tools for High School Teachers

11:30-12:30 pm D3-17 By: Julie Kindred +Julie Kindred and Daniel Telgenhof

If you are wondering what the potential is for iPads and iBooks Author, this is a great session to attend. Julie Kindred, self proclaimed tech-illiterate, created her own AP Statistics book this past summer and is using it to teach her students this year. She will give you the full details of her journey and tell you how it is increasing student engagement and learning. She is a wonderful and charismatic personality that you have to get to know.

Creating Impressive, Interactive iBooks with iBooks Author

11:30-12:30 pm Craig Van Ham

Craig is an incredibly savvy ed tech teacher that cranks out tons of video tutorials on different web 2.0 tools and apps. Craig hosts this wonderful collection of helpful tutorials on MiLearning's iTunesU space. Craig also has created tutorials to get you started using iBooks Author.

So, I encourage you to check out a few of these sessions, get introduced to iBooks Author. And, if you are teaching in a 1:1 iPad environment, or soon will be, then you definitely want to get involved with the iBooks Author Hackathon going on this summer. For more details and registration check out the website here: http://mibookexchange.wix.com/ibahackathon

Disclaimer: I am not sure if there are more sessions going on at Macul highlighting this tool, sorry if I missed someone's session. Please add it to the comment section below.

Posted in authorship, Hackathon, iBooks Author, iPad, Macul | Leave a comment

Digital textbooks created by Textbook Companies

By Unknown | Published Sunday, February 26, 2012

I wish the length between posts could speak cause then I wouldn't have to write this or the next post. Time quickly slips by so I will try to recap because I feel iPads in the class are becoming more exciting to me over the past few months revealing to me their true worth.

Towards the end of the semester we took a break from video lectures to use one of our textbook companies free apps. There has been a lot of talk around digital textbooks and if the iPad is great at anything it is great at delivering interactive text, images, video etc.

Our goal was 1) to see the app functioned 2) to see how students reacted to using the app and 3) see if it can be used independently for students to gain understanding - in other words we again gave them a roadmap and said we'll help you along the way but meet you at the end.

The app was essentially the textbook and its online resource that were made for the iPad, i.e. all the flash content on the website was made into a viewable interactive format for the iPad. So in a sense it was like handing the students the text book and saying read for comprehension. This was actually quite disturbing how many students struggled with this.

Overall kids did fine, not great, but not horrible either (except for a few). Given more chapters perhaps students would become accustomed to this learning method and do real well with it, they would use all the features, and better understand the layout and navigation. But it caused me to wonder at $8.33 /year/kid (more costly than a $7.99/yr Mathflix subscription) could teachers create the same dynamic, interactive, iPad supported environment for less? After all we have been tailoring their videos to fit their needs, writing online quizzes that provide instant feedback, and supplying homework solutions to guide their work- all equivalent features of the app.

My answer to this question and others was answered by Apple in their release of iBooks2, iBooks Author, and iTunes U app. I can't begin to explain how incredibly exciting these pieces are to education. I have to believe that this opens up incredible possibilities for the iPad in education, teachers as authors, and students becoming mastery learners.

Posted in authorship, iBooks Author, interactive, iPad, textbook | Leave a comment

Students using Showme to... well, show me and the World.

By Unknown | Published Thursday, November 17, 2011

My friend Kip introduced me to the Showme App this summer and right away I feel in love with the ability to capture screen annotations and voice narrations as the user is demonstrating something on their iPad.
Now in class I can demonstrate solving and graphing an inequality using Showme, and instead of not being able to hear or see that explanation again, the captured vodcast can easily be linked or embedded in a classroom website for later viewing and reviewing.
As my familiarity with the app grew I thought "wouldn't it be great for students to use this to help their classmates with difficult problems and demonstrate to me what they truly know." We distributed the free app to students and literally watched and listened as they showed me and their classmates what they knew.
However, an interesting thing happened the other day. Being curious about how I could use the showme website to support student learning I started clicking through some topics. After selecting Learn by Topic > Geometry I was blown away by what I saw. Here it is:

You see up until now students have solved problems for basically two people: themselves and their teacher. But now students are solving problems for an audience of millions. When I projected the website for them the other day and showed them how their works was showing up in just two clicks of the mouse their mouths dropped. They were blown away by the fact that their work was published and freely available for anyone to view and use. I wish I could have take a picture of their faces you could see the sense of ownership and pride in their work take on new meaning.