iPad Textbooks: Reality Less Revolutionary Than Hardware
Apple’s launch on Jan. 19 of new digital-textbook software has educators and experts considering whether students will learn more and better using these and other tablet-based resources. Measuring the effect of these tools may prove complicated, and experts, including Ron Owston of Canada’s York University, say teacher effectiveness and the environment in which the technology is used are important factors. “Kids need some structure. They need guidance. They need feedback. They’re not going to get that from electronic books alone,” Owston said.
Wesley Fryer, Moving at the Speed of Creativity is proud to announce the worldwide publication and release today of Rachel Fryer’s first eBook, “Snowflake Gets Lost.” I’m the proud papa of Rachel (age eight) who worked from August 2011 through January 2012 during “writing workshop” time in her 2nd grade class in Oklahoma City Public Schools to author this book. Rachel’s classmate, Madison Bertsch, illustrated the text. The book is available for download in both an enhanced/multimedia version (with embedded audio clips of Rachel reading each part) and a standard eBook version for Kindle, Nook, iPad, and other eReaders. I created the website MeetSnowflake.com for Rachel and Madison to distribute their free eBook.
Take a quick look at iBooks Author, the new tool from Apple that lets you create textbooks for the iPad. You can design and layout pages like in iWork Pages. You can also add special elements like photo galleries, quizzes, 3D objects and interactive images.
http://macmost.com/ibooks-author-overview.html
http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/
Available free on the Mac App store, iBooks Author is an amazing new app that allows anyone to create beautiful Multi-Touch textbooks — and just about any other kind of book — for iPad. With galleries, video, interactive diagrams, 3D objects, and more, these books bring content to life in ways the printed page never could.
iBooks Text Books
http://www.apple.com/education/ibooks-textbooks/
iBooks Text Books Video
http://www.apple.com/education/ibooks-textbooks/index.html#video-textbooks
iBooks Author
http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/
iBooks Author Video
http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/#hero-video
Technology Made Easy, iBooks Author
http://www.tmadeeasy.com/tablet-apps-in-education/tag/ibook-author-tutorials
Overview of the new iTunes U
http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/
Public Site Management Enrollment K-12
https://eduapp.apple.com/
iTunesU Guidelines and Course Creation
http://images.apple.com/support/itunes-u/docs/iTunesU_Course_Guidelines_011912.pdf
iTunes U App
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/itunes-u/id490217893?ls=1&mt=8
http://gear.lv/wRPJCW – iBooks Author is an amazing new app that allows anyone to create beautiful Multi-Touch textbooks — and just about any other kind of book — for iPad. With galleries, video, interactive diagrams, 3D objects, and more, these books bring content to life in ways the printed page never could.
iBooks Author makes it simple to flow in text, graphics, movies, and more, so your book looks exactly the way you want. Drag and drop a Pages or Microsoft Word document to the Book navigator to add it as a new section. Then, when you drag and drop in images, your type automatically flows around them.
iBooks Author has everything you need to create a great-looking book. Add text, shapes, charts, tables, and Multi-Touch widgets anywhere on the page with a single click. Mask images, use alignment guides — even add reflections and shadows. It’s as easy as using a word processor, but powerful enough to design more advanced layouts.
Be sure to catch more of our videos by subscribing, or checking us out at http://video.gearlive.com.
In a special event in New York City, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller and VP for Productivity Software Roger Rosner unveiled a pair of free apps aimed at reinventing the textbook market: iBooks 2 and iBooks Author for the Mac. Not content to stop there, Senior VP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue and VP of iTunes Jeff Robbin then introduced the free iTunes U app for iOS.
Read the full story, CLICK HERE
If you are sturggling to wrap your head about the whole Book-eBook-ePub thing, read this article!!
David Andrade is a Physics Teacher and Educational Technology Specialist in Southwestern CT. I am also a Paramedic and EMS-Instructor. He has an insightful post on his blog today about:
Some other teachers asked me what I use with my classes, since I don’t use a textbook. The textbooks we have are 20+ years old, hard to understand and not very good in general. Instead, I use a collection of resources with my students. (I do use a Physics textbook, Giancoli Physics, with my AP class).
Absolutely worth reading if you are wondering about using or not using textbooks, etc. CLICK HERE to read the full story.
Make sure you watch the video on the linked page. It is thought provoking and informational.
There’s nothing textbook about them. Introducing an entirely new kind of textbook that’s dynamic, current, engrossing, and truly interactive. A textbook created by publishers using a new authoring tool from Apple. A textbook brought to life by iPad.
The textbook transformation.
Today’s students have grown up completely immersed in technology. iPod, iPad, computer — these are the ways they interact with their world. They need a textbook made for the way they learn.
The app opens to a series of templates, which include basic, contemporary, modern type, classic, editorial, and craft. I’m assuming that you can also use custom created templates that have been downloaded from external sources as well.
When a template is chosen, it switches into edit mode, which reminds me a lot of Keynote. There’s a bar on the left that organizes all of your pages, and the window on the right displays the page currently being worked on. I chose to experiment with a picture book that also has some text.
Read the full story, CLICK HERE
iBooks Author
Create and publish amazing Multi-Touch books for iPad.
Now anyone can create stunning iBooks textbooks, cookbooks, history books, picture books, and more for iPad. All you need is an idea and a Mac. Start with one of the Apple-designed templates that feature a wide variety of page layouts. Add your own text and images with drag-and-drop ease. Use Multi-Touch widgets to include interactive photo galleries, movies, Keynote presentations, 3D objects, and more. Preview your book on your iPad at any time. Then submit your finished work to the iBookstore with a few simple steps. And before you know it, you’re a published author.
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/ibooks-author/id490152466?mt=12
iOS device users stuck with technical manuals that are PDF only can use iBooks to read documents on the go. Read on to find out how easy it is to sync PDFs with your iPad or iPhone and read them on the go.
Getting PDFs into iBooks
There are two ways to import PDFs into iBooks: through iTunes, or by using another application on your iOS device (such as Mail). Let’s start by adding a PDF using iTunes.
- Adding PDFs with iTunes
- Adding PDFs from email (or other apps)
- Reading PDFs in iBooks
At Digital-Storytime.com, we are celebrating our first birthday! We’d like to pay tribute to last year’s very best picture book apps for the iPad and the developers who made these reading experiences possible.
For the final post in our blog, I want to highlight the 31 books to receive a perfect 5-Star review on our site. With over 400 reviews, that means these apps are the cream of the crop, representing fewer than 10% of all the titles we’ve seen. We have awarded all of these developers our “Digital Storytime Star” for overall merit.
By Gary Eason
http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/icloud?pt=TRK-0126-TCANNOUNCE
Understand the features, get set up, and enjoy iCloud!
iCloud may seem simple, but astonishing complexity lurks below the surface, especially for those who have relied on Apple’s Internet services for years. In this essential title from best-selling author Joe Kissell, you’ll learn what hardware and software you need to set up and use iCloud successfully on Macs, iOS devices, second-generation Apple TVs, and Windows-based PCs. Whether you’re starting from scratch or upgrading an existing MobileMe account, Joe has the advice you need to get started.
With setup completed, Joe explains the key aspects—and hidden gotchas—of iCloud’s core features: iTunes in the Cloud; iTunes Match, iCloud Backup, Photo Stream, Documents in the Cloud, Find My iPhone, Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and more. Also problematic are Apple IDs, and Joe explains how to work around problems with shared Apple IDs, non-email Apple IDs, multiple Apple IDs, MobileMe Family Pack accounts, and more.
For many, the prospect of moving from MobileMe is worrying. While some MobileMe services transition seamlessly to iCloud, others disappear as you upgrade, and still more will limp along through June 2012. To smooth your transition, Joe outlines what will happen to different MobileMe services, and for those that are going away—like Gallery, iDisk-based file sharing and Web hosting, Mac-to-Mac syncing, and Backup—he suggests alternatives.
http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/icloud?pt=TRK-0126-TCANNOUNCE
DemiBooks
FREE
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/demibooks-composer/id462838680?mt=8
Demibooks® Composer is the first iPad-based authoring software for creating interactive books. If you’re an author, illustrator, designer or publisher, and you’ve got a story to tell – then this app is for you! Composer is affordable, versatile and incredibly easy-to-use.
Create your own book apps with realistic physics, animation, sounds and visual effects. Share your stories with your friends via Composer or use our PrintShop web service to publish your book app back to the App Store!
Demibooks Composer allows you to harness the touch functionality of the iPad, and bring those features to your book app designs. Composer offers designers and authors a full set of tools and options for building interactive content, without requiring any programming.
Easy steps to create interactive books:
1. Select a Portrait or Landscape book
2. Import images and audio assets from your computer or use photos from your iPad
3. Add text and basic styles
4. Create frame based animations
5. Build pages
6. Add a navigation system
7. Add complex behaviors using the Effects Editor
8. Add and edit audio – music, effects and speech
9. Preview your changes in Composer
10. Export and save your work via Dropbox or iTunes
11. Share your work with your friends who also have Composer
12. Publish your book to the App Store via our PrintShop web service
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/creative-book-builder-create/id451041428?mt=8
Creative Book Builder enables everyone to create, edit and publish ebooks in a few minutes on the go. All published ebooks can be read by any ePub reader including iBooks. Everyone is publisher now!
Creative Book Builder can import document from Google Docs and parse HTML output into chapter.
Features
- Create unlimited number of chapters
- Add title, description, images, videos, audio recording, music, links, and lists
- Sort your content’s ordering within a chapter
- Customize your cover image
- Customize book information including author, title, description, subject, and publisher etc.
- Organize chapters into different sections
- Create multiple books
- Change font, text identation, and alignment
- Edit content offline
- Preview book in iBooks
- Email book
- Upload book to Dropbox
- Upload book to Google Docs
- Upload book to FTP Servers
- Import document from Google Docs into HTML formatThe format of the book is in EPUB format that includes HTML, javascript, css, jpg, mp4, and m4a, caf.
Book Creator
$6.99
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/book-creator-for-ipad/id442378070?mt=8
The simple way to create your own beautiful iBooks, right on the iPad.
Read them in iBooks, send them to your friends, or submit them to the iBookstore.
Ideal for children’s picture books, photo books, art books, cook books, manuals, textbooks, and the list goes on.
★ The no #1 Book app for the iPad in 18 countries
★ “Book Creator makes e-book publishing easy” – wired.com
★ One of the Top 50 Apps for the iPad – The Guardian 2011
Watch the video of Book Creator in action and find out more at www.redjumper.net/bookcreator
eBook Creator
$3.99
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ebook-creator/id448273828?mt=8
■ ‘eBook Creator’ is the simplest and easiest ebook creation application. Its interface is designed for all ages and skill levels so that young kids are able to make ebooks using the app.
■ You can make good quality ebooks using the functions such as image brightness and contrast adjustment, voice recording, background musics, etc.
■ If you have printed books at home, the books can be transformed into ebooks on iPhone just in minutes. Record your voice reading pages, the app turns pages and play the recordings just like you do the same thing.
■ ‘eBook Creator’ helps yours kids develop good “reading habit”. Furthermore, the kids will get to feel that reading books is pretty enjoyable if they record their own voices.
■ With ‘eBook Creator’, you can make various things such as ebooks, photo albums, kids art albums, scrapbooks, and so on as per your needs.
■ ‘eBook Creator’ gives you various graphical effects and sound clips. For instance, page transition, page frames, and background musics.
■ You can share ebooks, which are made by you, via email. ‘eBook creator’ automatically compresses the ebooks, attaches the files to iPhone email composer, titles subject, and fill in email body. You can just send the email after setting recipients only.
■ ‘eBook Creator’ offers 11 bookcases which are beautifully designed. You can name a bookcase according to your needs.
How to create an ebook is described as follows.
- Step1> Setting up basic information of the ebook. For example, title, author’s name, book orientation, page transition, page frame, and background music.
- Step2> Taking pictures of the pages in the book or select images from iPhone Photo album.
- Step3> Adjust brightness and contrast of each page.
- Step4> Record your voice reading the book.
- Final step> Preview.
eBook Magic
$3.99
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ebook-magic/id424877762?mt=8
eBook Magic: A fun and easy way to make custom photo books and epub books. The first book maker for iPad.
See the demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn57OhbnwiY
For the first time ever, iPad users now have the ability to easily create and export their own custom photo books directly from their iPad. With eBook Magic’s easy-to-use interface, users can quickly place photos on pages, add text, and share with their friends in minutes.
POINT, SHOOT, CREATE
As soon as you open the app, you’ve already begun to create! eBook Magic was designed to eliminate the hassle of desktop book making, allowing you to easily make custom photo books anywhere – anytime. Just wrapped up your vacation? You can have a custom photo album to share with your friends before you even get off the plane.
Have you played with Google Labs’ Ngram Viewer? It’s an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.
Convert PDFs into stylish page flip books
FlipSnack is an online flipping book software that allows you to convert PDF documents into Flash page flip digital publications. It’s the ideal solution for those who wish to embed a book, magazine, catalog, newspaper, portfolio or any other kind of document into a website or blog.
Once created, you can embed your flipping book collection, download them or share them on social networking websites such as Facebook.
P.S. With FlipSnack you can upload several documents at once, allowing you to embed not only one, but multiple page flip publications in the same Flash widget.
Free App, purchase, chapters and books!!
Historically, textbooks have been neither fun to purchase (they’re expensive) nor fun to lug around campus (they’re heavy). And depending on the subject matter, they are often rendered obsolete by the presence of updated information or changes in thought. Inkling is addressing each of these issues by moving textbooks out of the physical world and into the digital world of the iPad.
Matt MacInnis, Founder and CEO of Inkling, worked at Apple for 8 years and spent much of that time in Apple’s education group. As he sat in classrooms and watched teachers ask students to put away their laptops when it was time to learn, it dawned on him that things needed to change.
“I knew even then, before there was an iPad, that something had to give,” explains MacInnis. “We had to reinvent this physical, static, heavy textbook that everyone was still using and replace it with something that was more dynamic, something that connected people rather than isolating people from one another, something that was way more akin to the way that students spend their lives outside the classroom everyday anyway, and that’s really what we’re trying to build with Inkling.”
Inkling works with the major textbook publishers like Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Wylie and W. W. Norton. They disassemble the publishers’ market-leading titles as well as all the associated ancillary media such as videos, assessment questions and 3D objects and combine all of these elements to construct something from the ground up for the iPad. The result is a textbook that is interactive, able to be updated as new information becomes available and priced 30% to 40% less than the print versions.
“In Inkling…we connect people within the content,” says MacInnis. “We like to say that when you download any Inkling title, you get the collective wisdom of anybody who’s ever used that book before, because you have access to all of the conversations of every user, globally, who uses that book…As you work your way through Inkling content, you’re dynamically assembling a study guide. Every time you make a highlight or a comment or a note, every time you see something that somebody else said that you like, it excerpts that little snippet and throws it into your notebook, and that’s something you can go back and study.”
The digital version of each title is compatible with the print version, so students can stay in sync with the professor or with another student using the print version. Over 50 schools are already either recommending or requiring Inkling for their incoming students.
“It’s the sort of thing,” explains MacInnis, “where you take a gamble to reinvent a medium and do something that’s just way different from anything that people have done before, and [you] worry whether when people see it they’ll love it as much as you loved it in design. When people see Inkling, there’s this aha moment when they recognize that the way that you explore content on a device like this is just so different from anything they’ve seen before.”
Inkling web site: http://www.inkling.com/
Effective Mobile Learning 50+ Quick Tips & Resources by Shelly Terrell, it is a free PDF distributed by Simple K12.
“Do you know what mobile learning is, or if it’s the right fit for your students? If you’d like to learn more about mobile learning, I’ve got the perfect free PDF for you… This PDF, “Effective Mobile Learning: 50+ Quick Tips and Resources“, is a great starting point for you to learn more about mobile learning, and how to integrate mobile devices into your classroom.
This is a book every educator at evey level need to read. If you are trying to figure out how you are going to integrate digital media into your curriculum, Wes gives you the answers. it is powerful.
Order your copy today, http://www.speedofcreativity.org/ebooks/
We need to play with media to become more effective communicators. This book was written to inspire and empower you, as a creative person, to expand your personal senses of digital literacy and digital agency as a multimedia communicator. As you learn to play with digital text, images, audio and video, you will communicate more creatively and flexibly with a wider variety of options. Although written primarily for educators, anyone who is interested in learning more about digital communication will learn something new from this book.
As children, we learn to progressively make sense of our confusing world through play. The same dynamics apply to us as adults communicating with new and different media forms.
Related FREE Resources:
- playingwithmedia.com includes resources aligned to each chapter (digital text, images, audio and video) as well as the complete chapter on Copyright and Fair Use (free)
- share.playingwithmedia.com includes links to student media project examples using digital text, images, audio and video. Submit your own examples to enter monthly drawings for digital goodies!
Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing” is available in 3 eBook formats and as a paperback! Additional resources are on playingwithmedia.com. See and contribute student media examples on share.playingwithmedia.com.
For iPad Users: The Enhanced / Multimedia eBook – $14.99
If you have an iPad (or another iOS device, like an iPhone or iPod Touch) this is the version for you! The enhanced/multimedia eBook version includes seventeen different videos and screencasts which are embedded in the book and can be viewed using the free iBooks application. This means you do NOT need a “live” Internet connection to view these videos. This version is not yet available in the iTunes iBookstore, but IS directly available online from Speed of Creativity Learning LLC. Purchase this eBook on your laptop or desktop computer, then sync to your iOS device using these instructions from Apple. ISBN-13: 9780983104810.
For Amazon Kindle Users: The “mobi” Kindle eBook – $9.99
Kindle eReaders and Amazon’s Kindle reader software (available for Windows and Mac users) use a proprietary eBook format. Embedded videos/screencasts are linked in this version, but NOT embedded. (Kindle eBooks don’t currently support embedded videos.) This version is available in the US Kindle Store, UK Kindle Store, the German Kindle Store, and directly online from Speed of Creativity Learning LLC. ISBN-13: 9780983104827.
For all eReaders supporting EPUB format: The “standard” EPUB eBook – $9.99
Like the enhanced/multimedia and Kindle version, the “standard EPUB” version includes a multitude of hyperlinks and images. Embedded videos/screencasts are linked in this version, but NOT embedded. This version is available for Barnes & Noble Nook eReader users(from the official B&N eBookstore) and directly online from Speed of Creativity Learning LLC. If your eReader or eReader software supports EPUB (and most do, except Kindle) this version will work for you. This version (along with the enhanced/multimedia version) is compatible with the iPad / iPhone / iPod Touch. To view videos linked in this version, your eReader or eReader software must support hyperlinks. You’ll also need to be connected “live” to the Internet to view external links and videos. ISBN-13: 9780983104810.
