Book Creator for Chrome

I have been meaning to post about Book Creator for Chrome for a while now and make a couple of ‘how to’ videos but Book Creator themselves have beaten me to it which is a good thing.

Book Creator for Chrome is available on any device as long as it has the Chrome web browser installed.

The first 7min video reprises how to use Book Creator for Chrome as a teacher after making a teacher account. Being in Chrome it is nice how you can search for on line images as well as use your own to illustrate your book and with one click publishing it is very easy to work with.

Importantly at the moment when learners go to register as a student it asks for them to register with their Google Account. I queried this and was told that other options are in the pipeline.

Joining as a student is really handy because then they can then join the teacher’s library automatically via an invite code and their names automatically aligned with their books for easy recognition, feedback and possible publication on line.

The teacher makes a library for collaboration by adding a library and then clicking on the three dots on the right hand side of the shared library.

This then generates an invite code that is shared with students so they can join to teachers library. This needs to be ready for students as they sign up

This second video is how to import books from your Google Drive or iPad into Book Creator for Chrome so they can be further worked on and edited before publication.

Publishing books via the iPad app and Chrome is easy- I would love to see and share what you have created.

Please link in the comments when you publish a book so we can see what others have created.

Book Creator to Seesaw Workflow

Lots of schools I have been learning with have started using Seesaw as a means of sharing what has been happening in their classrooms with whānau. As you know I am a big fan of Book Creator and the two go really well together with the Book Creator export as a video function.

To help cement this workflow I have made this short video to show you how the two great apps can work so well together.

 

Presentation Tools

I was asked recently what presentation tools can I recommend. We have moved away for felt tip pens posters thank goodness. Children would spend a lifetime colouring in borders and copying writing fonts from books.

I wanted tools that are easy to put on line in one step- that is apps or sites that give you an easy embed code without having to upload it to a third party site.

My first thought was of using Google Slides. Kathy Baker from Chisnallwood Intermediate used Google Slides with her students to make these static images and poems.

Screen Shot 2015-10-25 at 2.41.50 pm

 

You could also use Google Drawings in a similar way.

Screen Shot 2015-10-25 at 2.48.30 pm

I thought also of Haiku Deck, Canva on an iPad and Prezi on my laptop.

Canva and Haiku Deck are nice and simple but you only get an image or a PDF to download then you have to do something else with it to out it on line. I have never been a fan of Prezi because it took me a long time to work it out. It does however give you an easy to embed embed code like with this Prezi on using Twitter by Ray Burkhill.

 

But over the week I was looking at a rather slick resource which was Adobe Slate made on an iPad. I used my Adobe account to sign up and very easily put this together on the iPad as an example. Once put together you can easily share it via a link in an email or via the embed code.

Click on the image below or this link to see the cool presentation on all its glory!

The things that I do

And now you can make Adobe Slate designs on line as well. https://slate.adobe.com/

What other presentation tools would you recommend?

Book Creator Ambassador

Book Creator is my most highly recommended iPad app for all kinds of reasons.

Firstly is its flexibility. I find it being used with pre-schoolers right through to senior students.

  • I see grandparents making social stories for their grandchildren and recording their own and the children’s voices.
  • I see junior school students using Book Creator to record and explain their thinking around all kinds of curriculum thinking areas.
  • I see more senior students planning, writing, illustrating and hyperlinking  their learning using the app.
  • I love the way that users can collaboratively author their books using the app and books started on different iPads can be easily brought together into one combined book for publication. We use Flick or Google Drive to bring the larger projects together in this way.

I see Book Creator being used across the curriculum in all sorts of ways.

  • Using the free hand drawing feature to explain maths strategies.
  • Using the camera tool to add illustrations from children’s own art work.
  • Using the add photos tool to add pre-recorded video self reflections on work or progress.
  • Using the add text feature for written language and hyperlinking to web resources.
  • To pull together an ePortfolio of learning throughout the term.

I really enjoy the intuitive ease of use of Book Creator. I love apps that don’t really need to be ‘taught’. If you want to add a new element you tap the + button. If you want to personalise an element select it and tap the i to get more info about what you might do with it. Easy as.

Book Creator is available across platforms as well so it works equally as well on an Android device.

When completing the books I also appreciate the myriad of ways they can be exported from the iPad as finished pieces.

Simplest would be to export to iBooks. This is a great option for those who want to read and re-read their books.

You can export the book as a video. This is a lovely way to bring the book alive. All of the audio and recorded video will play inside the exported video.iBook

You can export the book as an ePub. This way your book will be able to be read on any laptop with ePub reader app like Readium Chrome Web App, Mac iBooks or Calibre on a Windows Device.

You can also export your book as an ordinary PDF for printing for classroom wall display or to send via snail mail to our non digital whānau.

Book Creator has recently introduced their Book Creator Ambassador Programme to recognise and champion the uses of Book Creator in classrooms.

Book Creator Ambassador badge

I am proud to say that they asked me to join the programme. I can now add Book Creator to my Digital Badging Portfolio.

And now with the update you can excite and engage your learners with comic like books.

Book Creator Rarotonga

How do you use Book Creator with your learners?

Writing Books for iTunes

We have had some successes with writing books using Book Creator and publishing them to iTunes.

I thought I would outline the process here because it really is simpler than you might think.

Here is our workflow for this particular lesson.

It was Guy Fawkes and children had stories to tell of their fireworks experiences that we wanted to record and share.

Firstly we had a play with the Real Fireworks App that I had bought but I see that there is a free version as well. The app very cleverly lets you take a screengrab of the fireworks in action as you create fire bursts. These were saved into the camera roll and Flicked to me or using Photo Transfer to move whole sets of photos to the one iPad in one go.

To collect the children’s writing in one place for this lesson I decided to use Google Forms. I had found a cool video of a drone flying through exploding fireworks so threw that in the form as well to keep things lively.

Here is a link to the actual form. Of course the children needed to have access to the form so I embedded and linked it into a blog post in the Moturoa Blog. The blog is bookmarked on all the devices they children have at their devices and added to the home screen of the iPads so everyone knows where to access everything we might need.

http://moturoa.blogspot.co.nz/2014/11/fireworks.html

The children were able to view the video independently and write their text in the form.

That night I had a bit of a play with copying the text from the form that I accessed via Google Drive/Google Sheets app on the iPad and pasted it onto the screengrabs that I had quickly out in Book Creator.

I matched the colours of the text with the colours of the Fireworks so it would all look lovely.

Next day I had the children record their narration of the text. To improve the quality of the recording I used my iRig Mike and my mike on the Apple ear buds, which worked quite well.

I wanted to have a little video in the book as a practice so used X-Mirage to reflect my iPad onto the Mac and record the fireworks using Quicktime. The video was small enough to email to my iPad but I could have uploaded it to Google Drive if I needed to to get it onto my iPad for inserting into the Book Creator. Boom! We were nearly ready to upload to iTunes.

I needed to do a couple more things before sending it off to iTunes. I needed to make sure the video was in mp4 format. To change it in Book Creator just select it and click on the ‘i’ and change the format!!

I also took a couple of screen grabs and made a copy of the book and took some pages out to act as a book sample for those who didn’t want to download the whole book.

I uploaded the whole project to Google Drive as it was too big to email to my laptop. Google Drive gave me a shareable link to the multi-touch book that I could then share with people directly via an email link or blog post to give them a copy of the book without sending it to iTunes.

STEP ONE: Create an iTunes Connect Account

I had already made a iTunes Connect Account to publish the Bling For Your Blog book so that part was simple. Book Creator has made a handy ‘how to’ on how to get started with an iTunes Connect Account. Here is the link to it. I think the process would be a lot more complicated if you wanted to sell your books but I decided that they were all going to be free!!!

STEP TWO: Install iTunes Producer

iTunes Producer is the software template that allows you to upload your books, previews and blurb. You connect the iTunes Connect Account with iTunes Producer. Book Creator again shares how to do this part.

STEP THREE: Upload Your Book

This is the easy part. You fill out all the information about the book for upload and if you get it wrong you will get error messages. This was the first time I had uploaded page previews and they had to be a specific size. I chose 748 x 1024 for the preview pages and 1023 x 1400 for the title page. Here are Book Creator’s notes on what to do for this part.

Screen Shot 2014-11-19 at 10.55.14 pm

iTunes then takes a look at your book and makes sure it is suitable to be in the iBooks Store and a day or so later your book is available for the world to download.

Do take a look- We think it’s rather cool.

https://itunes.apple.com/nz/book/fireworks/id942796591?mt=11

Fireworks

If you didn’t want to go that extra step of publishing your book to iTunes you could easily export it to you Google Drive or Dropbox and get a shareable link from there. Here is the link to the direct download of the Fireworks book from my Google Drive.

IMG_6925

IMG_6920

And if you don’t like to have the book upload to iTunes or as a download From Google Drive you could always export it as a movie and upload it to You Tube as I did here.

Embedding You Tube Videos from an iPad

A friend who had got herself into a bit of a loop recently wanted to know how to embed an Explain Everything exported video into a Blogger blog and only use an iPad. I have found that if you just use Safari you can get caught in a loop of using the You Tube App and you can’t get to the embed code as you would be able to do easily on a laptop.

To make the original test video I used Explain Everything.

You will also need to have Chrome installed on your iPad.

To record the tutorial I mirrored my iPad onto my laptop using Reflector App.

To make the finger taps visible  on the iPad I used Mouseposé. Mouseposé is a Mac App so I tapped the Mac screen with one hand while tapping the iPad screen with the other hand at the same time to make it look like I was opening apps etc on the iPad. Any other ways of achieving the same affect would be much appreciated.

I also added this as a resource to Bling for Your Blog to make it easy to find. Hope people find it useful.

After making this tutorial and sharing Deon Scanlon from Australia suggested an even simpler way of embedding a You Tube video into Blogger that didn’t even need an embed code. It’s funny isn’t it. You always do what you’ve always done. I had used Deon’s method for photos but hadn’t noticed it for videos.

Adding Keyboards in iOS 8

This is cross posted from my Boys Writing Blog

Over the holidays I updated my iPad to iOS8 which allows for users to install new keyboards from app developers. I have had Swype on my 3G Android Camera for some time and liked it. I wondered how it would go with kids. Some liked it and some didn’t. I think if you are very much a struggling writer then tapping each letter as you go would be a better option but for those who have some writing skills under their belt Swping would be worth persisting with to get the hang of it.

Play the video in full screen to see what T is saying and Swyping to see how it is supporting his writing.

T doesn’t know how to spell through and spelt it as thought but when he spells operation as operasion the app leads him to the correct spelling and gives him close choices should his Swping be less than accurate.

I also liked the way that he pauses to think of the word in chunks to better help him break down the writing process- the video helps make the learning visible.

I notice that T is also pushing the space bar for spaces between words. The app knows where the spaces are as he takes his finger off the screen so he doesn’t necessarily need to do that.

The other keyboard that I think that would be good to install as a choice with be Lower Case Keyboard by our very own Matt Thomas.

Matt has made the lower case keyboard with the Open Dyslexic font so as to better support learners who find differentiating letters tricky.

Just a note though that there is a bit of an iOS bug at the moment and you need to turn off guided access before you can install the new keyboards. I am sure it will be ironed out before too long.

ULearn14 Mobile Day: Dice Activity

This year at ULearn Mobile Day Barbara Reid and I shared our learning around ‘Transforming Learning with an iPad’. We wanted to make the event as engaging and useful as we can, modelling self directed learning and collaboration amongst participants.

One of the ideas we had was to lead participants in combining apps on their iPads to create and share new learning artifacts. I had used the same idea at Newmarket School Teacher Only Day earlier in the year and it worked really well.

I thought I would share the share the process and resources here so that others could take that same idea and run with it themselves.

Firstly we chose six apps that were more about the collection of information: the camera, Safari web browser, taking screen grabs, Drawing Pad, AR Dinopark and Pattern Shapes. These apps also could pretty much be used for a variety of purposes, not limited to one curriculum area or level. We also tried to pick apps that had light versions so people would not feel obliged to buy apps before seeing their potential.

Then we chose six great creative apps: Book Creator, Pic Collage, Popplet, Puppet Pals, Show Me and Write About This NZ.

I took screen grabs of all the app icons and used the app Foldify to make a dice with all the apps on them. If you would like to use the nets yourself to replicate the  activity here are the links to PDFs for Dice Set One and Dice Set Two.

Foldify

 

I photocopied the PDFs from Foldify onto good quality photocopying card. Cutting and gluing the nets took quite some time but it is something you can do while multi-tasking.

All the dice

The idea then was that people rolled the two dice. You use what ever two apps roll together to create and share the artifact.

To support and encourage independence and discovery I had made short tutorial cards to support individuals who may not have been familiar with the app design and use. Copies of these are able to be downloaded here.

Screen Shot 2014-10-16 at 11.15.41 pm

Some of the participants chose to work on the activity outside of the table space we were allocated. I think next time I would encourage more people to move outside and use their environment more.

Dice in action

 People came back with some great creations showing their combinations of apps. We attempted to Flick the artifacts to the iPad on the main screen with less success than I would have liked. I think the wifi was a bit pushed by the size of the movies etc being Flicked around.

Dice Combination

When we do this again we would make a third dice that would extend the activity to include curriculum learning areas, so you might have to combine screen grabs with Popplet and create an artifact that supports learning in Mathematics.

Let’s Write About This

I can’t recall how I first came across the Write About This app but liked it immensely from the very start. The concepts behind this app grabbed me straight away and I could see the potential. How it works is this…

Children select a photo prompt that engages them from a good selection of categories or they could potentially take their own photo.

They are then prompted with a choice of three levels of questions of increasing complexity with an audio overlay in case reading independently is an issue.

They then write their stories and if they want to they can then read their stories aloud and export them as movies for publishing on the web. How motivating for learners!

The only problem with the app as it was when I first saw it was that many of the images were distinctly American- aircraft carriers, men in uniform, yellow school buses, grid iron football- and the voice over was in an American accent. And the spelling- all those favorites and colors!

I got in touch with Brad Wilson, the app developer, and asked about the possibility of making a kiwi version. He was keen so I enlisted the assistance of the Learning with Digital Technologies team for support. Monika Kern took me up on the offer and together we worked on identifying images that we needed to change and sourcing new ones with a distinctive kiwi flavour.

We did try to record the audio prompts ourselves but it was taking too long and we were unsure of the consistency so Brad organised a Kiwi voice over artist. And here we are now with the app being launched in the iTunes store. How awesome is that.

Screen Shot 2014-08-30 at 9.58.26 am

I am chuffed that they used a photo I took on the way home from working in Blenheim earlier this year as a cover photo. The youngest member of the fire brigade team proudly stood by the truck to have his photo taken while the rest of the team were giving him cheek.

Here is a quick recording I made to show you a finished story. I would love to see what you and your students come up with.

You can also purchase Tell About This from the same team which focusses more on oral retelling.

Here is one we made with the Kiwi version of the app…..

Connections, diversity, coherence: Three vignettes exploring learning with iPads in primary schools

After much deliberation and collaboration I am delighted to be able to share a research paper exploring learning with iPads written by Karen Melhuish, Tania Coutts, Tara Fagan and me!

The paper was published as a special iPad focussed edition by Otago University Centre for Distance Learning

The paper’s abstract follows…

In New Zealand, there are growing numbers of schools which are investing in iPad
deployment, ranging from schools who have made a strong commitment to iPads
through to those who have purchased a small number for student groups to use. Recent
studies have comprehensively reflected the kinds of affordances that iPads offer, such as
mobility, flexibility, ease of use, and range of applications. It is timely to begin to
consider the type of education that might be afforded by such technologies. Using three
future-focused themes—diversity, connectedness and coherence (Bolstad, Gilbert,
McDowall, Bull, Boyd, & Hipkins, 2012)—as lenses for analysis, this paper presents
three vignettes from junior classes that reflect the way iPads might afford deep,
personalised approaches to learning to support young people effectively as they move
through their school years. The analysis suggests that, where educators adopt a
learner-centred pedagogy as part of a whole school systematic vision for learning,
iPads can offer a powerful tool for engagement.

You can read the whole paper by clicking on this link.

There are quite a few other well researched papers in the edition that make them well worth a read. Click here to read more of the iPad research.

IMG_0382

 

Book Creator to Web

Today I was facilitating a couple of iPad workshops and I was asked  about the workflow I would use to have books made with Book Creator on the iPad available on the web for adding to a blog or other online space.

Here are a couple of ways of doing it.

1. The first was is to use Reflector.app  that you download onto your laptop to mirror your iPad onto your laptop screen. Reflector costs about $25NZ or $12.99US. Then I would use Quicktime on my Apple or Jing on a PC to record the screen as the book was playing.

And then I would upload that video that I had made to Vimeo to embed on my blog.

Here is a little video of that happening. I apologise that these tutorial videos are not fabulous but hopefully you will get the idea of what is happening in each one.

Book Creator to Quicktime from Allanah King on Vimeo.

2. The second way costs no money at all. You send the book to your laptop via email if it is small or via something like Dropbox if it is larger. Then you move to your laptop and open up Chrome web browser. You use the Chrome extension Readium with your Chrome web browser. Open the Book Creator ePub in Readium and the audio and video will play.

This is great for adding another way to read/play your favourite books created with Book Creator.

I am told on good authority that the new Mavericks OS for Apple will be able to read ePub without needed the Chrome web extension. This will make it one step easier.

Then you can record the screen using Quicktime or Jing as before.

Here is a little video of that happening.

Book Creator to Readium from Allanah King on Vimeo.

How I see the SAMR Model

Everyone is talking about the SAMR model for eLearning.

A principal emailed me this week wanting to know more about the concept so I emailed her with a reply but thought it may be useful to add my thoughts more publicly too.

The SAMR model is based on the thinkings of Ruben Puentedura.

In a nutshell here is how I see what the SAMR letters stand for.

SSubstitution– would be you just used an iPad as a flash sort of text book for the kids to read and copy from.

AAugmentation– you might have the text book read to you via Speech Selection so that is moving things up a notch.

MModification– You might make your own book using Book Creator that includes graphics, audio, video and hyperlinks etc

RRedefinition– You might have students all collaborating making pages for a Book Creator including graphics, audio, video and hyperlinks etc and combining them in one book which you then publish it on iTunes.

I made this graphic using Explain Everything app to show the levels of SAMR.

SAMR Model

I think that the iPad can be an excellent vehicle to raise our game around learning but I am concerned that some teachers think that if they had enough iPads, or Chromebooks, or laptops or whatever, then they would be better teachers and the children better learners. Unfortunately it doesn’t happen like that.

I have seen some people place different iPad apps on a dimension of the SAMR model as though there they sit, fixed, but I would beg to differ.

Take for example the free app Tellagami for iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone. At its most basic level it is an avatar maker- you can change the look and features of a male or female avatar and take a screen grab! Easy enough but let’s put it on the SAMR model.

SSubstitution– You make an avatar, take a screen grab to use as a prompt for writing in writing time.

Tellagami Avatar

AAugmentation- You could create an avatar, upload a background image then write or record a script for it to describe a classroom happening, a visual mihi, or whatever as in this intro I made for an upcoming iPad workshop. Or a learner could take a photo of their artwork and their avatar could talk about how it was made and a self reflection on the process.

Launching Learning with an iPad from Allanah King on Vimeo.

MModification– You could combine the learners’ short projects into one segmented movie using iMovie. This example by Greg Swanson, ADE from Australia, shows this idea really well. His students each produced a segment for the instructional video to show evidence of learning.

 

RRedefinition– You might invite others, not from your school, or region or country to each make their own segment, then collaborate to make and share their Tellagami projects. The end result being a collaborative video like Paul Hamilton, another Australian ADE has done with this project.

 

So what I am saying here is try to think of and use apps that allow learners to create, engage,connect and collaborate. Aim for the Redefinition end of the SAMR model- don’t limit yourself to the mere Substitution dimension.

I would love to hear your thoughts and examples and thoughts on using the SAMR model in your classroom with your students.

Recording audio with Audioboo, to Safari, to Blogger

iPad Work Flow

Audioboo- Safari- Blogger 

Audioboo http://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/audioboo/id305204540?mt=8

Audioboo is a native iPhone app that you can use on your iPad. You can easily record audio and upload it to your blog. You can record up to five minutes of audio.

Audioboo

Either log in or sign up to have an Audioboo account. Click record.

There is a 3, 2, 1 countdown before you start recording.

You can pause the recording as you go to take a breath or gather your thoughts.

Click publish when you’re done recording. Name your recording and add a photo. It will queue to upload. Then you’ll see a little red 1 added to My Boos.

 Click on the arrow to the right of your Audioboo. 

Click on MORE and OPEN IN SAFARI.

Look for where is says EMBED. Press and hold to select all of it when you see the embed code.

Blogger

  •  Now you are ready to share your video. Go to your Blogger in Safari and log in.
  •  Click on the pencil to write a new blog post.
  • Paste the copied embed code into the body of the blog post.
  • If you have labels on your blog remember to add it. Then click Publish.
  • Go to Safari to see how the blog post looks!

 Go to Safari to see how the blog post looks and listen on line!

If you would like to view this tutorial as a printable pdf here it is.

 

Camera Roll to Vimeo to Safari to Blogger

iPad Work Flow

Camera- Photos- Vimeo- Safari- Blogger

Vimeo  http://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/vimeo/id425194759?mt=8

 You can make simple video trim edits from within the iPad camera roll itself. With Vimeo you can upload your videos to Vimeo and embed them on your blog. 

For this tutorial I used the iPad video camera to take a movie. This workflow works with any video in the Camera Roll. In this project we are only going to trim the ends of the video. To do more complex editing I would recommend iMovie.

To take a movie open the camera app slide the camera icon to the right.

Once you have made the movie it will be in your Photos Camera Roll. You can trim the beginning and end by touching the timeline at the top until it turns yellow & drag the ends toward the middle and then click TRIM.

Vimeo

  •  Open the Vimeo app and log in or join. Click on upload.
  • Choose the video that you want to upload. Give it a Title and select its quality. It will upload. This might take a while.

  • The video will render for a while and then you will be able to see it in the timeline.

  • Click on the video to play it and scroll down the screen to see a menu bar.
  • Click on the CC to select the appropriate Creative Commons licence.

  • Click on the Up/Down arrows to pretend to email the link to the video so you can get the URL for the video.

  •  Press and hold the URL address, select and copy it. Post the the URL into the Safari address bar. Look for the SHARE icon.
  • Look for the embed code. Press and hold the embed code. Select all of it and copy it.

Blogger

  •  Now you are ready to share your video. Go to your Blogger in Safari and log in.
  •  Click on the pencil to write a new blog post.
  • Paste the copied embed code into the body of the blog post.
  • If you have labels on your blog remember to add it. Then click Publish.
  • Go to Safari to see how the blog post looks!

If you would prefer to download a paper copy of this video you can do so here.

This work by Allanah King is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

What’s the Weather?

I have noticed that many junior classes have a daily ritual of recording the day, date, weather and forecast.

Thinking of the SAMR model and how we can redefiine this task I noticed Ginger Lewman had been recording where she travels by using the iPad app Instaweather Pro. I see it is also available for Android on Google Play.

903121958-rounded

I was thinking how each day a couple of children could go outside and use the app to record a daily weather photo. The app knows where it was taken, records the temperature, says the time, day and date, sunrise and sunset. All good information for data gathering over time.

Instaphoto

The image could then be shared on the class blog with children recording in their own voice how the weather is and what their aspirations are for the day!

Thinking of what level this would be in the SAMR model I would probably go for Modification- the use of technology allows us to do more – significantly redesigning the learning task.

What do you think? How could I take it up one notch more??

Modern Learning Environment

I have the privilege to be asked to share some of my thinking around Modern Learning Environments in Auckland this week. The day was hosted by TTS and held at Sorento. Here is my presentation so participants can click on the links and easily find the resources that I am sharing. As always I think of other things I need to add after I have published something but as my mate, Kevin Honeycutt says, ‘Don’t wait to be good at something before you do it’. Here is my something!

All of my favourite apps that I use in my classroom or see the potential of are on my initial iPad set up site for people new to iPads who want to know where to start.

https://sites.google.com/site/initialipadsetup/home

I add to it all the time as I come across new things and occasionally ditch things as something better comes along. My most used apps are those where we get to create things, to make things and learn things.

All of the links in the presentation below should work too to take you straight to the app link in iTunes.

There were some strange participants at the conference!

Apple sMACdown

One of the regular highlights of #Ulearn12 is the Apple Smacdown where Apple Distinguished Educators and Apple fan people share their favourite Apple apps or learning in a fast paced sharing session.

Everyone only gets two minutes to share their stuff and all their links must be on line and readily clickable.

Dorothy Burt and Fiona Grant kick things off and everyone takes turns to share their stuff. It is a great session with last year’s smacdown and participants contributions listed.

Take a look at the cool sharing and learning. You can still add your own cool tips to add to the resource.

https://sites.google.com/a/ptengland.school.nz/smacdown/home

#ULearn12

I am really looking forward to the Google Summit and ULearn this year. One of my presentations is ‘Transforming Learning with an iPad’. A little presumptuous maybe but I do believe that putting an iPad in children and teachers’ hands can really transform the way we do things in school.

I have stripped the embedded media from my Keynote presentation, converted it to Powerpoint and uploaded it to Slideshare in the hope that more people than the 30 in my workshop will get the benefit of seeing what I am sharing. Some of the formatting is a bit off but you can get the idea!!

This is a third revision from earlier in the year.

The hyperlinks work so if you click on them it will take you to the apps directly.

Continue reading

ADE Camp

Over the weekend I had the privilege of attending the Apple Distinguished Educators first ever New Zealand official get together in Auckland. Apart from getting to know one another better the main thrust for the event was to make a video potentially for iTunes U. We were put in to three groups of five with a Final Cut Pro expert on hand for when we got stuck and got on with it. It was a little like Masterchef with a final countdown for 4pm on Saturday afternoon. Almost two solid days of work for a 90 second video! The end result was pretty good though.

I am happy to say I have a couple of things in iTunes U already owing to my involvement in the K12 OnLine Conference over the last couple of years.

While we were there we were privileged to also hear from Rhonda Kite, the CEO of Kiwa Media. I was impressed, very impressed with her vision, passion and skills. We have such talented New Zealanders here.

It is Kiwa Media that have developed the Hairy Maclary and Wonky Donkey apps that I already had. Previously I had just had the apps auto play but now realise there is more to it than that. On my return to school on Monday we had a look at the Hairy Maclary book being signed as it was read. My class were impressed as they could sort of see what was being read at the same time as listening and reading. Then we had a go at adding our own narration. Fortunately the I had a parent willing to help and an empty classroom next door because I left my iRig noise cancelling microphone at home.

When I got home I used Reflectionapp to mirror my iPad onto my laptop and used Quicktime to record the screen and Vimeo to post to the web.

I put it on the Moturoa class blog via the iPad Blogger app. Take a look and have a go yourself.