Dictation on the iPad with Book Creator

Book Creator is one of my go-to apps on the school iPads. I work at an international school with students from all over the world. A great accessibility feature of iPads is the dictation feature in the keyboard.

I have used dictation in Book Creator as a way for young learners to be able to get their thoughts typed up more efficiently. I find it really helpful for young learners to be able to speak aloud their sentences and see them being typed up by the iPad.

Well, did you know that this in-built feature works for languages other than English? In the screenshot below I have used the Indonesian keyboard to access dictation in Indonesian. It works so well! What a fantastic way for students to practice pronunciation. Go on try it now with a language that you can speak ...

Go to Settings - General - Keyboard

Choose any keyboards you wish to make available. 

Now open Book Creator. When you want to dictate, select 'Add Text' from the plus menu. 

When you dictate - click the world icon on the bottom left of the spacebar and select your language. Press the microphone icon and speak your sentence. It's works best if you only dictate short sentences with either a hands free microphone or work in a quiet space.

Authoring eBooks with the Deaf School in Jakarta

My current class is working on a project to author eBooks with the deaf school here in Jakarta. We have already had two face to face meetings. In the first meeting the Grade 4 from SWA travelled to the Santi Rama Deaf school. We paired up each student and got down to work.

As preparation, both Grade 4 classes learned how to do some simple ASL - American Sign Language. We learned to perform the song Fireflies in ASL. It was interesting to learn the song and quite fun too!

We learned during our first meeting with the deaf school that Indonesia has it's own sign language. Luckily it is really similar to ASL so we were able to use a lot of what we had learned in preparation. We found that being able to spell out words came in very handy!! My first sentence in sign language was 'What's your name?' and 'My name is Jane'.

Prior to our first meeting I travelled to Santi Rama with my partner teacher Ade to meet with the principal and discuss the details of the project. We agreed that the deaf students needed to prepare their stories in advance by writing them down on paper. We also asked that each child supply some drawings for the book illustrations.

In that first meeting we were able to begin making the story in Keynote. The plan was to create all the layouts in Keynote and then do the final formatting in Book Creator. Out issue is that there is only a small set of iPads at our school and we can only borrow them for a short period of time. It takes time to create a quality book so I will do the final format for the students in my class. The students will simply export their Keynote pages as JPEGs and I will put the videos and pages together and export them out of Book Creator as an ePUB3 files. 

In the second meeting the Santi Rama students travelled on our school bus to SWA. They had a great time playing with our students and working on the final video shoot for the sign language. It proved to be challenging for the deaf students to sign each sentence as they were using vocabulary that was not common so they needed extra support from their teachers. This is the first time that they had ever tried to make a digital story book that included sign language videos inside. Take a look at the school Vice Principal supporting this Grade 4 student to do the correct sign language for the sentence, 'Ghina was really happy and thanked God'. This story is about Ghina herself and how she celebrated her recent 11th birthday.

The books are looking quite nice and I am slowly putting the final touches on them in Book Creator. Take a look at these cover designs. My students are currently making Book Trailers in iMovie to promote each book. I can't wait to show you the finished products. It's certainly keeping the teachers; Jocelyn, Ade, Julie and myself all very busy!

Reading Book Creator Books on a Macbook and More

I was so very excited to receive the newest update for the Book Creator app for iPad last night. This update offers extra support for ePub 3 which now makes it possible to read Book Creator multimedia books on a Macbook or even a Windows computer.

I eagerly tried it out and it works really well! I even tried it on my husband's Windows computer. Take a look!

A lot of my books that I have already made with Book Creator can already work using Chrome with the free Readium app.

Here's how you make it work ...

Download the Chrome browser here and then be sure to add the Readium app from the Chrome store. Get it from here.

Then you click on the + sign to add books from your computer hard drive. Here is a photo of the book  'Our Batak House' made in Sumatra during the Backpack Classroom project being read on a Windows computer. In case you're wondering ... yes all of the voice recordings work well.

Here is a screen shot from within the browser. I am so excited about this development. The new update for Book Creator offers even more support for this. Now you no longer need an iPad to read books that have been created on an iPad. This means that even more people can read the books that we create.
Perhaps even Android might get into this and make an app to support Chrome with Readium?

Accessibility in iOS - Getting your iPad to Speak

I recently presented a mini workshop about Accessibility in iOS in Bangkok. This is new learning for me. I have had my current iPad 2 for several months and I can't believe that I only just learned that it can read the screen in 36 different built-in languages!

This feature works best with iBooks. This means that you can get your iPad to read your iBook to you. I have my own iBook that I wrote in Indonesian so I decided to test it.

To enable VoiceOver I prefer to use the Triple-click Home method in the Accessibility settings on the iPad. This gives the user greater control to turn the VoiceOver on or off as necessary.



To adjust the speaking rate in the VoiceOver section of the settings slide the setting towards to turtle to make the speech slower.



Before you try using the VoiceOver you will also need to select the languages you wish to make available in the Language Rotor. You can select any languages that you will use. You need to select VoiceOver and then inside that tab you select Language Rotor.



Next open iBooks and open a book that you would like to have read to you. Open the book to the page that you want read. Enable VoiceOver by tapping quickly three times on the home button.

To activate the rotor, tap and hold the screen with two fingers and rotate your fingers. It's a little like turning a dial with two fingers. You will see a dial pop up. You can select the 'language' setting on the dial.



To change between languages you tap the screen as if you are making a check mark. You will hear your iPad call out each language. When you get to the one that you want, tap on the text to hear your iPad read the text aloud.

Accessibility on OSX - making your Macbook Spell

I recently presented a mini workshop about Accessibility on OSX. This is something that I previously didn't have much experience with and I am very grateful to Jane Harris for giving me the following suggestions.

Jane taught me about reverse spelling. A traditional spelling test is when the teacher reads out a list of words for the students to spell. Jane's idea is to reverse this, to get your Macbook to spell out each word. In Lion, the Macbook has a built in feature for speech.

To enable this in Pages you simply highlight the text you want spoken, right click it and select speak.

For spelling, just put a space in between each letter - s p e l l . Your macbook will spell the word.
You can teach your students to create personal spelling lists and then they can get the Macbook to spell out each word whilst they write it down.



You can adjust the speaking speed in the System Preferences settings in the Speech section.



To adjust the speed of the speech you can slide the speaking speed to 'slow'.



Another idea is to create slideshows of vocabulary words in iPhoto. In iPhoto make a folder of images (an Event) and rename each image with the word of the object. You can also add a description which is a sentence that includes the vocabulary word.



Hold down the shift button to select all images and create a new Slideshow.



In the settings make sure that you select 'Show Captions' with Title and Descriptions selected.



You could encourage your students by playing a couple of their visual spelling slideshows each day