Showing posts with label interactive. Show all posts

Sharing Knowledge, Inspiring Creativity

By Unknown | Published Wednesday, April 17, 2013

If you have read any of my other posts or pages on this blog you will know that I am a big proponent of teacher created (hacked) interactive books made for the iPad using iBooks Author. See our summer project here.

So, in honor of attending the #NCTM conference this year in Denver and in hopes of inspiring creativity in others and generating feedback (kind critiques) of my own work I am posting two semi-polished interactive books. After downloading them to your iPad please revisit this blog and leave a comment giving feedback to the work in progress. Thanks!

You will need to download these books from an iPad and chose to open them in the free iBooks app.

Geometry: Transformations75 MB Download to iPad

Geometry: Circles70 MB Download to iPad

About the Books

Both of these books are created in iBooks Author and are only viewable on the iPad. However, if you wanted them in ePub format we can provide that format you will just lose most of the interactive features.

Both books contain student friendly text, images curated from creative common sources, HTML widgets that allow for exploring patterns and relationships, and quizzes both embedded and online. In addition to these features, the books contain videos, some that are embedded that will play offline and others that are streamed from YouTube.

Posted in creativity, iBooks Author, interactive, iPad, math, NCTM | 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

The Interactive Lecture... Delivery Part 2

By Unknown | Published Wednesday, December 7, 2011

A few years ago I studied Classroom Presenter 3 and wrote my masters thesis on tech enhanced interactive lectures. CP3 is an amazing piece of open source software that creates a dynamic interactive student centered conversation in the classroom and in my opinion would make a killer app for the iPad (anyone want to develop it?) The incredible thing about CP3 is that it takes a teacher centered static powerpoint and allows for student input, instant feedback, and an ability to diverge from the linear path of a ppt slide show.

I mention this because video lectures are the foundation of flipped instruction, a style of instruction that I am very fond of and feel compelled to pursue in light of 1:1 iPads. In addition, I am keenly aware of how, like powerpoint, video lectures run the risk of creating a non interactive didactic teacher centered delivery.

This forces many questions. How does a video become interactive? Should video lessons just be explorations that ask questions? Is it best practice to use video to guide students through notes and example problems? How do you ensure students are listening to the lecture and not just copying notes? Are there editing tricks or guided note tricks that make a video more interactive and increase student participation?

Being a math teacher I want my students to see mathematical relationships, recognize mathematical patterns, and learn properties of shapes, functions, and graphs. However, I also recognize that it is important to model problem solving techniques by providing examples that the teacher walks through.

So where does that leave me? As of today I think I am somewhere in the middle of all this. My notes require students to answer questions based off what was said in the video but they also contain examples some completed for them others only partially completed. Here is a sample of where I am at with my vodcasting I like to call em Mathflix. I don't have an allusions of grandeur thinking that I can offer subscriptions for $7.99/month I just thought it was a fun name.