Teacher created iBooks in math class.

This is my 6th year of creating iBooks for my students and as I look back over the years I want to document how the end product has changed. I feel like my iBooks today are closer to where they need to be in terms of ease of student use, stimulating initial exposure and understanding of a concept prior to classroom conversation, and forcing students to grapple with a few problems on their own.

Three major changes have impacted my design: 1) my newly adopted ‘4-step’ learning philosophy, 2) less is more (or keep it simple), and 3) action problems for students to wrestle with and discuss among themselves prior to teacher directed instruction.

In the past my iBooks tended to carry too much content (probably because I was over zealous about my creativity and the potential of iBooks Author to bring math to life). The content was all good but too often students were overwhelmed and lost in knowing what to do with all the information. Pairing down the sheer number of content pages and limiting student activity to “Read”, “Watch” and “Take Action” has seemed to help clarify what students are expected to do with their iBooks assignments.

As mentioned above the flow for students now is for them to ‘read’ 1- 1.5 pages of content, ‘watch’ a short (7-11 minute) video, and ‘take action’ by completing 3 problems prior to coming to class the next day.  This series of photos is from an Algebra 1 iBook lesson on “Fitting a model to data” and demonstrates this new flow:

read

watch

take action

If you are interested in seeing more example lessons from Algebra 1 here are three different iBook units that I use with my students. These iBooks may be downloaded to your iPad, iPhone or MacBook.

Algebra 1 Unit 1- The Universe of Algebra (300 MB)

Algebra 1 Unit 2- Relating Variables (300 MB)

Algebra 1 Unit 3- Linear Equations (250 MB)

As always, feel free to leave comments below, share ideas, offer suggestions. I’m still learning how to make learning most impactful for my students.

Interactive grammar iBooks

Our english department uses grammar books that were printed in the 60’s. I guess this is a good indication that despite Merriam-Webster adding new words to the dictionary every year, the “how-to-use-these-words” (grammar) never changes.

ELA teachers swear by how “great” these books are in regards to their superior instruction on the rules of grammar. Yet, they are expensive, in poor condition, in limited supply, and rely on passive individual student reading as the means for instruction. There has to be a better way!

Shawn Jacob, a former stand-up comedian/magician turned educator (wouldn’t you like to be in his class?) and dear friend of mine took the challenge this summer at the iBookhack.org event in Zeeland, Michigan to begin creating, what I believe, is the answer to this subtle groan from the high school classroom of students learning grammar.

Shawn at the iBookHack.org event this summer.

Privileged to be helping Shawn, we started discussing his multi-touch iBook during the winter break of 2013. You see, besides being a former stand up comedian Shawn also has extensive experience in designing and building websites. This part of Shawn’s personality made it imperitive that we laid out every page, icon, font, and interactive idea with pencil and paper before taking to the authoring tool of iBooks Author.

In the end what Shawn created is absolutely delightful. The pages of his iBook bring forth his personality extending the relationship he has established with his students. Well designed pages and easy to follow chapter layouts makes navigating the pages and content of his iBook straight forward. Students read, listen, interact, respond and write directly within the pages of the iBook. So how did it go?

Recently, I shot Shawn an email to tell him that I was tweeting out his freshly released iBook from the iBookstore and how proud I was of him and his work (two things Shawn is not- boastful, on twitter). He shot this response back to me:

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Thank you, sir!

My juniors just finished using it over the weekend, so I gave them an in-class quiz today. The average grade for two of the classes (still need to grade the third group) is an A-. And that’s without me doing ANY lectures on the subject matter, so it’s all been done at home on their own. Pretty cool. It’s been great to have all that extra class time to work on writing, discussions, etc. 🙂

Tweet away!

Thanks again for all of your help with this. Now if only I had the next iBook ready for my students… There in for a real snooze-fest when I have to haul out the purple books next week…

 

When we think about how technology is impacting education we often think about equal access, cool projects such as coding, or flipped classrooms. While these are all well and good I think we too often over look how technology allows for master teachers, such as Shawn, to spend more time with students working individually or in groups on the matters that enrich the lives of students and deepen a healthy student-teacher relationship.

Download Shawn’s iBook from the iBookstore.

More recently Shawn was interviewed by our local news station WoodTV 8. In this interview Shawn shares more details about of his iBook. View the interview here.

iBooks Author is xCode for Teachers.

If you’re not familiar, xCode is Apples suite of software that is required to develop iOS apps. If you wish to create a multi-touch app for iOS then you will need to know how to use xCode and program in Objective-C. While this is a bold endeavor, it is a massive time and learning commitment that most teachers can’t commit to. The average teacher with a creative and pedagogically sound idea for an app may never see it realized.

iBooks Author is Apples standard for e-publishing. It is free in the Mac Appstore and is everything BUT ‘standard’ when it comes to delivering a polished interactive iBook. The WYSIWYG interface makes it easy to drag and drop text, images, media, and interactive elements on to it’s pages and export a multi-touch book with a push of a button. While digital books may not be the app envisioned by the teacher, they do offer great benefits to student learning and in a way that is interactive and “app-like”.

Consider the following.

1. Two years ago, the same time iBooks2 and iBooks Author were released, Apple claimed  it had over 20,000 education related iOS apps and over  500,000 pieces of open educational content available in iTunesU.  

2. As of February 2013, Apple declared there were more than 8 million iPads dedicated to education in circulation.  

3. The release of Mavericks OS X in October 2013 amplified the viewing potential of books made with iBooks Author with the launch of iBooks for Mac.

4. Today the Appstore holds 65,000+ apps related to education and iTunesU has doubled in size containing almost an equal number of k-12 courses as it does post secondary courses.

What about the iBookstore?

 Shouldn’t ‘books’ and ‘textbooks’ be a valuable part of  the education ecosystem?

Exploring the iBookstore for educational multi-touch content is underwhelming and disappointing. Sure, you’ll find the full blown iBooks made by major publishing companies. For the most part, these ‘textbooks’ are making some progress from their original static PDF format and becoming much more interactive. However, they are still full blown ‘textbooks’.  They are massive in ‘weight’ (storage space), costly (yup-even at $14.99), impersonalized, and still written like a textbook.

What you won’t find a lot of (although there are some instances), are the smaller more granular sized books that are created by individual teachers around a particular unit, theme, or lesson of study.

Here’s the point.

The massive advances in Open Educational Resources, the continual growth of 1:1 iPad and MacBook environments, and equal access to the authoring tools and publication space as major textbook publishers are creating a perfect scenario for teachers and districts to author their own high quality multi-touch content.

There is great appeal to moving away from static, large scale curriculum and towards a more dynamic granular size curriculum that is created and owned by the teacher and or district. All stakeholders in education stand to benefit from this transition.

On the micro level individual students using teacher created multi-touch books will continue to learn in a more self directed state from the same classroom teacher they see on a regular basis. In addition, iBooks foster multiple styles of learning allowing for text, images, videos, and interactives to guide the students conceptions.

On the macro level schools and districts will be able to move away from costly printed or digital curriculum. Allowing them to repurpose money for technology, professional development, or student services.

Is this transition really possible?

I guess I am going to leave this question unanswered for the moment. I think the fact that we are asking the question is evidence that the opportunity exists and therefore should be a goal worth striving for.

But then again, this is just my opinion. I would be happy to hear yours.

Snow day = hack day.

With our recent bout of chilly temps and mass amounts of lake effect snow I found myself with a few extra days to get creative and be productive. If you know me then you know I love creating multi-touch books for my math students. So, here is the latest results of my 7 snow days, a multi-touch iBook for my 1:1 iPad geometry classroom on similarity.

Feel free to download it to your iPad or MacBook running OSX 10.9 and open it in iBooks. I don’t think it is ready to fully replace my textbook but I do believe it’s getting there. Hopefully this summer at the ibookhack.org our teacher created multi-touch curriculum will be ready to be deployed for the fall of 2014.

Any geometry teachers out there want to offer feedback on content quality, design, user experience/usability etc. I would love to have your feedback. Please feel free to leave your comments below.

Tap here to download (175 MB download)

Thoughts on Instructional Design for iBooks Author

These may be simple and obvious ideas for many educators and curriculum directors. However, for me, these are a few of the things I’m beginning to understand better when it comes to designing e-learning experiences and in particular iBooks Author content.

LESS IS MORE

iBooks page containing several tasks.

An earlier page out of my iBook contains several tasks with the following elements on one page: text, defined terms, an interactive directed towards discovering the rules of rotations, a video to watch, a sheet of homework, and a link to our online quiz site. In addition to the content there is also the blue bars on the top and bottom of the page.

Does this seem like a bit much? Overwhelming to look at? Confusing? Wondering where to begin and what to take away?

Take 2

This page from the same section of a later edition contains only one task along with text, defined terms, and the interactive directed towards exploring the rules of rotations.

A later edition of the same content.

This may seem obvious to designers but to the everyday teacher it takes a bit to step back and recognize the mess we are creating when we jam content into confined areas and in an order that makes no sense to the end user.

Let’s face it, many of us teach our students to jazz up their presentation, add flare, transitions, unnecessary images and emojis, etc. We are guilty of teaching this style of design and when it comes to creating and packaging content ourselves we break the rules of “less is more.”

What we don’t realize is the cognitive confusion a cluttered page delivers in terms of the end user experience. We don’t realize the power of white space to draw the attention of the reader to one area of the page, one task to accomplish, one piece of content to absorb and process.

Lesson Learned

Use space intentionally to direct the end users attention towards the task of that page. If the task is to learn through reading, then text and images will suffice. If the task is to learn through an interactive element than consider isolating that element on the page. If necessary, scaffold the instruction clearly and concisely on what the end user should get out of the activity.

FLOW

Video game designers talk about the “flow” as the effect a game can have to totally absorb the user in it’s content and design and fully engage them in the games activity. While it may be a stretch for an educational “text” book to absorb and engage the learner in such an all encompassing manner it is certainly a worthy end to strive for when publishing.

In the end the “flow” must take the user from where they were prior to engaging the content to a new and higher level of understanding. However, if flow is muddled and not well thought out it could have the reverse effect.

When considering the flow of your elearning experience we must first think about the learners prior knowledge. It is important to build upon that prior knowledge and know some of the possible gaps within that knowledge so as to know what might need more attention in your book.

In addition, we need to consider the end users prior knowledge about learning. As digital books become more of the norm the users will better understand how to learn through multi-touch interaction. However, for many (or at least mine) of our students their first use of a digital textbook may prove to be frustrating and confusing.

For myself, I particularly like the 5 E’s approach to instructional desgin: Engage, Explore, Explain, Extend, Evaluate.

Here is what the majority of my chapters end up looking like:

Chapter title page: High quality image that hopefully hints at the topic of the chapter.

Intro page: Including graphics and guided questions or lesson targets- students should be able to answer these questions by the end of the chapter.

Warm-up page: (not seen here) 4-5 questions that activate prior knowledge, math skills, etc, that will be needed in this chapter.

Engage: typically a question or interactive to lead them into the content.

Explore: more inquiry based learning for students to try and formulate an understanding of the concept instead of just being told the concept.

Explain: Text, images, example problems (some interactive some not), and video solutions. All these are used to drive the concepts home, help solidify the conceptions and redirect any misconceptions.

Extend: (not seen here) a time to apply the concept taught at a higher level of thinking. More than just a one step problem. Could include many forms of student driven content creation.

Evaluate: Simple reviews purposed for the students own benefit. Either affirming that understand the content or that they need to go back and review the explore and explain pages.

STRUCTURE

Related to the flow of an elearning experience (in this case an iBook) is its structure. The structure deals more with the layout of each page where as flow deals more with the content on the pages.

Structure is important in building trust with the end user. If the user understands the structure of the page then it will be easy for the reader to navigate and more energy can go into understanding the content as opposed to trying to figure out the navigation of the page.

This is where choosing to author in portrait or landscape becomes more of a decision for the author.  With iBooks Author you can choose to author in both, leveraging the ability of the iPad to rotate and shift media to the left margin and viewed as thumbnails.

As for me I prefer to author in landscape. However, I am totally intrigued by the portrait concept of the left hand margin.

So, for many of my books I have decided on using a landscape orientation with two columns. The left column is set at 180px and the right is set at 700px. With the built in gutter spacing this makes for a left column of 216px which is just enough space for a thumbnail video.

Adding in the divider I believe helps students focus on the main column of content and use the left column as  a reference for the current page.

One thing I have learned early on in writing interactive multi-touch books is that you’re never going to get it right the first time you do it.

I won’t claim to be doing everything right. In fact, I am probably still doing more wrong than right.  I guess I write this to say it’s constantly changing. I am constantly looking for new and better methods of making the user experience better and getting them into the flow.

This is a Hackathon!

GR- iBooks Author Hackathon, photo via Steve Dickie

I can’t tell you how often I get asked the question: “Why is this called the iBooks Author Hackathon? What does that mean?”  Let’s break it down and tell you why.

What is a ‘Hackathon’?

According to Wikipedia

an event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers and project managers, collaborate intensively on software projects. Hackathons typically last between a day and a week in length. Some hackathons are intended simply for educational or social purposes, although in many cases the goal is to create usable software. 

But aren’t ‘hackathons’ just for programmers? Nope! Back in February 2012, Steven Leckart wrote in Wired Magazine 

The trend [hackathon] has already spread beyond the conventional tech world. There are women-only hackathons, hackathons for teens, hackathons for college students, hackathons to fight autism, hackathons to improve education, hackathons to help veterans, hackathons to build Occupy Wall Street protest tools, hackathons on clean energy…

So this is how we found ourselves calling this the iBooks Author Hackathon. It is a multi-day, intensive, collaborative event to create usable products that will improve education…this is a hackathon! 

The Characteristics of an iBooks Author Hackathon 

1. Passionate and creative educators seeking to author high quality interactive content. 

To date over 85 educators and a half a dozen trainers have come together at a hackathon to learn about iBooks Author and create interactive ‘books’ for their content area / grade level. In addition, participants learn about copyright, creative commons licenses, open educational resources and a way to collaborate with colleagues to share these books.

2. Collaboration of workers to create in community. 

We truly believe one of the factors that makes this event so powerful is the ability to collaborate with a common goal in mind. Participants spend some time throughout the two days whiteboarding their thoughts and ideas for their books. A lot of our time is spent with individuals helping them think through creative ways to build their books. 

3. Inspiring each other with their creativity and sharing of ideas.

In addition to collaboration, sharing is another big goal of this project. Too often teachers create and work in isolation from one another. A key factor of any hackathon or Google 20% time is to share out what you are working on, what you are creating and get feedback, input, and help from the greater audience. Throughout our time together we paused to share out what we were doing. 

4. Energy and a buzz of excitement around the end goal. 

For me, this is perhaps the greatest characteristic of these events. A full day of professional development can be a lot to ask of a teacher especially in June (early June). But we weren’t asking for 1 day, this was 2 FULL days of learning and making. At the end you’d

expect folks to be checking out, playing games, and basically doing anything but creating. Not here. 

Participants worked up to the bell. They were excited about the potential for impact these interactive modules (see and download my examples here) could have. They weren’t jumping through some administrative hoop, they weren’t checking an item off

their to-do list. Rather, the product they were making was desirable, it will help teachers and schools sustain their iPad environments, and the they could grasp how to make it happen through the training and resources they were equipped with. 

Of course when you put on a hackathon there are a few requirements to keep that edge of excitement. For us, that meant raffles a few times throughout the day, a video chat from the team at Bookry.com, cool t-shirts supplied by Bookry for the participants, awesome lunch food, great snacks throughout the event and finally a free registration towards MACUL 2014 to give away. 

This was a great two days of making. We have several more planned throughout the summer (see details here). However, we also recognize this is the first in a string of years to come that will be necessary to truly meet the end goals of this project- open educational ibooks for k-12 content- that others can download, personalize, and distribute to their students. 

Reflections on the first iBook Author Hackathon.

It has begun. Over the past 6 months this moment has been built up, played out, and romanticized in my mind. It is hard to believe that the first of several of these 2 day events has come and gone.  This marks the beginning of the summer of an amazing movement by k-12 educators around the nation to make open educational ibooks. This project is described in more detail on our website: http://mibookexchange.wix.com/ibahackathon

If you haven’t heard of Monte Vista Christian Schools it’s because it may be the countries best kept private school secret. This beautiful campus is tucked away in the outskirts of Watsonville, CA and is home to about 800 middle and high school students. Among their many claims to fame is the fact that they were the first school to go one to one iPads in the U.S. And now they are first into this initiative to create a repository of open educational ibooks for k-12 education.

Our relationship began a few months ago when high school principal Steve Woods reached out to me and asked if I’d be willing to come out host a hackathon event on their campus. Here are a few reflections on our time.

There were 25 hackers in all from San Francisco to Santa Cruz to Los Angelos (actually the folks from LA had to drop at the last minute but are still participating virtually). We gathered on the beautiful campus of Monte Vista Christian School in a Mac computer lab perfect the size of group we had.

We spent a few minutes talking about how this project came to be, why it is important to k-12 education, and what the end goals are. The following two hours consisted of learning about iBooks Author as an authoring tool and attendees built their first book using resources that I had gathered for them.  Even though most of us didn’t get around to creating our actual books in iBooks Author I think it is best to spend that morning time learning the authoring tool and showing attendees the possibilities of an interactive learning experience.

Right before lunch we were privileged to get a Google hangout chat with the wonderful staff from Bookry.com. If you don’t know what Bookry is all about I encourage you to check them out. In a nutshell they provide complimentary service to educators creating widgets to use in their iBooks. Rhys, the company founder, gave us an overview of their upcoming quiz widget, sure to be a smashing success among educators looking to get student feedback on a variety of question types.

The afternoon consisted of learning about copyright, creative commons, and public domain content. I want to thank Josh Mika (@ijoshmika) and the invaluable resources he has provided in this area. I don’t know if we could have spent enough time on this topic as it is surely a concern when creating digital content. We scoured the resources provided in our iTunesU course in addition to learning a few search techniques for finding creative commons content.

Another good chunk of our afternoon consisted of learning about the collaborative space we will all be working in to access each others work and build our repository. The space we have chosen to do this in is called Box.com. Again, if you haven’t looked into Box I highly recommend them as they offer some amazing services in addition to their cloud storage. This area of the training came to take up more time than I had anticipated as folks needed to see how to function within this platform. So we ended up spending another hour demonstrating how a content area team could work together to create different chapters of the same book. This did prove to be beneficial and I believe Box will help us attain our goals.

In upcoming hackathons I will do this a little differently, including getting folks into this space sooner, stashing content there for them to download and experiment with and model the collaboration process.  Furthermore, it became evident that people need to see a workflow modeled for them. Including how to search, find, and attribute open educational resources. They need to be exposed to tools such as Skitch for capturing their screen, Textmate for editing HTML code, and the basic Apple suite such as Quicktime, Keynote, Pages, and iMovie for creating and formatting content.

Overall, it was a success. I consider it so because it’s a first step down a long road of creating high quality multi-touch interactive books that others can download, personalize, and distribute to their students. Without the first step of exposing them to the project, training them in the tools, and bringing them into the collaboration the movement would have not begun. We would have continued to create in isolation. However, the community is forming, the learning is beginning, the content is growing, the ideas are improving, the flywheel is starting to move.