Tag: iBooks

One Best Thing

As part of the Apple Distinguished Educator Institute last summer, we were all set the homework of creating some resources to share best practice with teachers. We were given three options to choose from: Community Engagement (ADEs collaborating with museums/libraries etc. to create resources), Lessons for the Classroom (an iTunes U course that demonstrates how iPad can work in the classroom) or One Best Thing (a multitouch book sharing one way that Apple technologies have made a difference in the classroom). For ADE newbies, we were recommended to do ‘One Best Thing’, so I decided to do one about using Explain Everything as an Interactive Whiteboard.

 

It’s quite a short book, but is now published on the iBook Store, so do take a look!

iTunes U

Very interesting post by Fraser Spiers about iTunes U. Take a look!

This could be very interesting and useful if/when we deploy some iPads in September! It seems to be able to take the concept of using the iPad for learning, rather than just learning to use an iPad. It also makes the case very strongly in my mind for having one apple ID per device; the whole iCloud ecosystem opens up for you in very useful ways.

Thoughts on iBooks

Apple’s announcement this week about iBooks 2, iTunes U and iBooks Author was very interesting.  Fraser Speirs has written a good article about it over at Macworld discussing it all.

Here are my thoughts:

  • Having a school of Macs puts us in a very good position to take advantage of all this stuff if and when we get iPads.
  • iBooks Author is remarkably like Pages and Keynote.  Really must do some staff training on iWork to get people used to them…
  • I’m already intrigued about using Wiki Server to distribute ePub documents to students and so the ability to create interactive e-textbooks becomes a lot more interesting and useful.
  • iTunes U is definitely something to be looked into, especially if it can replace features of a VLE.  More investigation needed.
  • I wonder how we are meant to install iBooks Author across a network? I don’t fancy setting up a iTunes account for every machine in the school.