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.

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You could also use Google Drawings in a similar way.

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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?

Storybird- a change of mindset

I recently was preparing a workshop for teachers around Universal Design for Learning and student engagement and was doing some research. An article on TKI mentioned Storybird as a vehicle to engage reluctant learners in writing.

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I never like to recommend something without giving it a trial for myself. Fortunately I teach at a local school as well as being a LwDT Facilitator so had some willing learners to help me trial the tool.

I registered myself with a Storybird account and to keep things simple I manually entered the students names into Storybird and then set about changing the passwords that Storybird had assigned students and aligned them with the students’ Google Accounts.

This took a bit of time but paid off with fewer students having to be reminded of what their passwords were.

All of the writing activities we try need to be accessible on a variety of devices as I have Chromebooks, Mac Books and iPads to use and not enough of each to be exclusive. Storybird works well on all of these devices. To access the Storybird website on the iPad I made it into a shortcut on the home screen and on the laptops it was linked from our Moturoa blog.

Once all that was set up I made a practice picture book myself so that I would be one step ahead when we used it in class. In introducing the concept to my boys we said we will trial it for a few weeks and they can give their verdict on it.

We cracked into it. On first reflection I was underwhelmed. The idea is that you get a selection of images to use, select one and then use the images produced by that particular artist. You can search for images from a topic to get you started but my boys wanted to write of motorbikes and rugby and there were no images related to those sorts of topics to choose from. You cannot pick and mix the artist. Once you select one artist you can only use other images that that person has created.

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We pushed on as it was a trial. Although the illustrations were stunning some of the boys were reluctant to pick anything as none appealed. In the end they picked something and used that although it wasn’t a choice that initially engaged them. Few of the images lent themselves easily to building a narrative sequence so some of the boys just wrote  captions for the random images that engaged them.

Some however really engaged with the Storybird concept and managed to relate the images together to do quite a good semblance of a narrative.

After the writing and editing was done the boys pushed SAVE and PUBLISH and I was able to easily publish it with the provided embed code.

 

To spice things up a bit we also had a competition with voting via the blog to decide which stories we like best.

Please add your vote to the blog side bar to encourage the boys in their writing.

Our verdict

  • Stunning illustrations
  • Easy to use
  • Easy to embed
  • Intuitive interface
  • Works well across all devices
  • Limited mix of images- you have to use one artists’ images and cannot pick and mix
  • Limited range of images related to some of the things the boys wanted to write about
  • Once engaged some boys really involved with the process and showed an interest in working on it at home.
  • You can invite others to work on the stories collaboratively but we never really went down that track.
  • The teacher can leave notes on children’s writing as feedback on the process
  • You can read and reflect on other people’s writing by leaving comments which can be moderated.

As a final reflection I was thrilled when a parent joined in and made another book at home with her child and invited me to collaborate on it with her and she left a comment on the blog post.

 

Wonderful work and writing. This has opened up a whole new world of e-learning to me and I’m loving it I’ll be back for more!

 

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.

Easy Accents – Macrons- Google Doc Add On

A couple of days ago Chris Harte, who was in my group at the Google Academy last year, posted on Google Plus about an Add On to Google Docs ‘Easy Accents‘ that allowed writers to easily use accents when writing.

As I often do I emailed myself the link so I could look at it more when I had a moment.

This afternoon I had a moment.

Dan Baker had originally posted that he had updated the app but sadly the accents didn’t include Māori macrons, only French, German and Spanish. I took it upon myself to ask Daniel if there was a possibility of adding Māori. Dan lives in Missouri and the time zones must be compatible with a Sunday afternoon in New Zealand so there followed a quick flurry of emails and a shared Google doc and within the hour the job was done and being pushed out to Google servers globally.

Screen Shot 2014-11-02 at 5.45.10 pm

So now go to a Google Doc- ADD ONS- get add ons and look for ‘Easy Accents’ or click here directly to add it to Chrome.

Screen Shot 2014-11-02 at 5.48.01 pm

I have not been able to contribute much to Connected Educator Month because of other work commitments but I think that this is what being connected is all about.

I am so impressed with Daniel’s responsiveness I donated to help him along and encourage young developers like him.

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.

Mawhera Taniwha- Google Drawings and Google Slides

Today we were learning how to make Google Drawings and layering them with transparent png images. We were going to ‘TOOLS- Research- Images- Free to use’ to find our images.

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We used ‘taniwha png’ as the search term so we would get images with transparent backgrounds.

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We found our background image and layered it and went to ARRANGE – send to back, to made sure it was at the back. Then we went and got the taniwha image and put it over top. The Taniwha of the Mawhera caves lives on!

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Then we took it a step further. We made an animation in Google Slides of the taniwha swimming up the river. The original image I used for the taniwha was black and it didn’t show up very well against the dark background so when I got home I imported it to Pixlr Editor (Chrome Web App) and changed the colour to white so it would show up.

Instructions for how to make transparent images and change the colour with Pixlr Editor are linked here.

To make the animation we made our first slide with the Taniwha on it, duplicated the slide and moved the taniwha image slightly, duplicated (Command + D or CTRL +D) and ever so slightly moved the taniwha again, repeating it. Then we just scrolled through the slides really fast and the taniwha swum up the river. Try it it’s lots of fun.

Kids will have a ball!!

You can also take it a step further by embedding the presentation into a blog or Google Site. All you have to do is publish it to the web and change the timings a little…..

Go to FILE- PUBLISH TO WEB and change the size to small and tick the box that says ‘Start slideshow as soon as the player loads’.

Take the embed code and copy it to where you want the presentation to load and change the timing. For where it says 3000 change it to something like 300. And publish.

So this way the animation will play without having to tap away to progress the slides.

Google Educator #alwayslearning

I have been busy lately learning and studying for the Google Educator Exams. The deal is that you have 90 days to sit four compulsory exams: Gmail, Google Calendar, Sites & Drive and a choice of either Chrome or Chromebooks. I chose Chrome.

Last Friday night I felt inspired and took the last exam and got a Google Educator Certificate to add to the portfolio!

Google Educator Logo

As Google is still rolling out the new Google Drive and the exams are more aimed at the old Drive I decided to not to move to the new interface until I had passed them all and got the certificate so I have only been playing around in the new Drive for a week.

I must say I am loving it but you get used to old ways of doing things and some things are in different places and they take a bit of getting used to.

Alice Keeler has been tweeting some good little tutorials that help with the new interface and I have listed some on my Google Site.

I was asked this week how to copy files in to multiple folders in the new Drive and it was a bit tricky to explain with screen grabs so I made a couple of screen recordings to show what Jon Keelty and Monika Kern were trying to tell me to do. Or at least this is what I thought they were trying to share with me!

The Drag and Drop Method!

The Move To Method!

Let’s Booktrack

If you were anywhere near Twitter over the weekend you would have seen the tweets in a tsunami like wave pouring from the #edchatnz conference held at Hobsonville Point in Auckland. I kept an eye on the Twitter #edchatnz hashtag stream while I was working and the learning session that particularly interested me was that by Craig Wilson sharing the features of Booktrack.

I have had Booktrack Classroom Reader as an iPad app for ages after seeing an interview on the television some years ago when the app first got publicity!

In a nutshell Booktrack layers an ambient soundtrack over a text so that you listen to it as you read and the soundtrack keeps track with the pace of your reading. I remember back to the first book I read – the Selfish Giant. In the book a door opens and I heard that sound of a door opening in the text at exactly the right moment. I was impressed that the sound track matched the reading experience.

I Googled it and found this segment from Seven Sharp more recently in March 2014.

Seven Sharp

I asked participants at the conference via Twitter if someone could Skype me into Craig’s session but no one was able to. Craig, however, picked up on my tweet and offered to show me more via Skype in the following week. This was a perfect solution to finding out more about Booktrack and fill in the gaps of my knowledge of its uses and features- from the expert and just in time for an advanced Google Apps workshop I am leading in a couple of weeks.

The first point to be aware of is the difference between Booktrack Classroom and Book Track Studio and the Booktrack mobile apps.

Booktrack Classroom is for education with a school sign up and the books are for general consumption and safe for students to read and view. A teacher creates an account- adds students who can log in with a password which the teacher can change. This is a fabulous feature as you can make your own version of Single Sign On and have fewer passwords to remember. Craig also suggested making a parent account so parents can log in to read the works that children in the class have made. Books created in Booktrack Classroom cannot be linked to or generally shared without a log in- a walled garden. You don’t have to have made a Booktrack account to read the bookshelf books.

With Booktrack Studio books can be shared via a URL and the content could potentially contain more open content. There is the ability to flag inappropriate material which is a another great feature.

The Booktrack Android and iPad apps are both readers only. If you want to create your own soundtrack you need to do so on a laptop or Chromebook.

As well as the web app I like that it is also a Chrome app linked to your Google Account. Here are the links to all the different ways you can access Booktrack. You can’t say they are limiting access!!

When you first open the app you can read books that others have written as exemplars and just plain engaging books to read. But the creative side of me loves that I can write my own text and create my own soundtrack and publish it to the bookshelf for others to read.

Here is a sample book, The Farmer, the Rooster and the Jewel, that I put together. The workflow that I used was to have a student write a narrative in Google Docs- proof read, get feedback and improve it. I then copied the text into Booktrack and highlighted the text where I want the sounds to be placed. I can then layer from a zillion music, ambient or sound affects to add to the text. When done I publish.

Booktrack Example

I like this process for students as you have to read, re-read and make knowledgeable choices about which sound track or effect best fits with the text. I like also that readers can rate the book and see how many reads they have had.

Booktrack were also able to supply some research that shows how reading with Booktrack promotes reading and improves readability of texts.

Here are few video tutorials of the creation process

Very motivating.

I extend a big thank you to Booktrack and Craig who so willingly and passionately shared the process with me so I can on share it with others.

Here is an example recorded in class.

You can embed your Booktracks into a blog as well. How cool is that.

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.

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.

Show Me and Blogger

iPad Work Flow

Camera- Photos- Show Me- Blogger

Show Me http://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/showme-interactive-whiteboard/id445066279?mt=8

With Show Me you can record your own audio while drawing or import photos and give a commentary. In this tutorial I wanted to share a Running Record.

Show Me

Firstly I used the iPad camera to take photos of the pages of the book. Open up Show Me- if you haven’t already done so make you self an account. I would suggest making a separate log in email rather than signing up with Facebook or Twitter.

Click on Create new Show Me.

 To just record while you draw click the red recording button at the centre top but to record voice over photos click on the photo icon.

If the photo needs rotating then rotate it.

To record press the red button.

Push it again to pause the audio recording.

Tap Clear All to clear the screen ready for the next screen of recording.

Repeat until you’re done then click the blue Save Show Me icon. Chose a category and the Show Me will render and play.

Now open the Show Me in Safari.

Click where it says embed, make sure it is highlighted and press Copy to copy the embed code.

Screen Shot 2013-07-26 at 6.36.20 PM


 Blogger

Now you are ready to share your Show Me. Go to your Blog in Safari and log in.

Click on the HTML tab to write a new blog post, inserting the embed code.

If you have labels on your blog remember to add it. Then click Publish.

Go to Safari to see how the blog post looks! http://moturoa.blogspot.co.nz/2012/08/caitlin-reading.html

If you would like to download a paper version of this tutorial here it is.

And here is the actual blog post. http://moturoa.blogspot.co.nz/2012/08/caitlin-reading.html

Four Quick iPad Writing Tips

Here are four quick iPad writing tips in video form…

1. How to write macrons for Māori words.

2. How to quickly add a full stop, a space and a capital letter.

3. How to easily write an apostrophe.

4. How to easily write a single digit.

And if you want to sit through the whole 2 minute video you can watch it here…

If you are interested in how I started the video at various points along the time line I wrote a blog post on how to do that here.

https://allanahk.edublogs.org/2011/02/13/you-tube-videos/

Enhancing Workflow on an iPad

At the end of last term I was asked to lead a couple of presentations for the Learning at School Conference Roadshow run by CORE Education here in Nelson. It was the first time such an event had been held in the provinces and was really well supported by locals and from those further afield as well.

The presentation that I had not done before was Enhancing Workflow with an iPad- combining apps to share the learning. Here it is below.

 

I didn’t want to just spend the time just talking to the teachers at the workshop I wanted them to talk to each other- to share the learning that they already knew and become teachers themselves. And to have a base level of knowing how to work their iPad to do basic things before we went on to more advanced learning.

I went down to the local supermarket beforehand and bought a package of the now famous iPad cleaners as prizes and made up a bingo board for each person.

The deal was that people had to walk around the room and find someone who could show them how to do the tasks on the bingo board, that person showed them, then they had to do the task themselves. Then they could initial the bingo board. When they had five squares initialled in a row they yelled ‘Allanah’ and got a prize!

I was surprised the number of people who carried on just as eagerly after they had got a prize because they wanted to learn more. Eventually I felt I had to stop people so we could move on to the more advanced learning but I felt the whole session went really well because it was an energiser as well as a great learning opportunity.

iPad Bingo Chart- click on it to go to the Google Doc

To make it easy for you to personalise and make the resource your own I have made the bingo form into a Google Doc that you can copy and make your own with your own email address and the like.

The activity with all the links to the pdf tutorials and activities can be viewed and downloaded from the presentation above. It is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike which means you are welcome to mash-up and repurpose the presentation but please acknowledge the source.

The activity was very well received with participants coming to me later saying how much they enjoyed the opportunity to move and talk and share rather than being talked to for the entire presentation.

You may like to try the same sort of thing when you next share your learning with others.

I later repeated the presentation at the BYOD Conference run by Learning NetworkNZ at Albany Senior High School in the holidays.

iPad Bingo at BYOD Conference at Albany Senior High School