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!

Backpack Classroom Level 2

Tomorrow marks the second time that I will run the Backpack Classroom. This time I am taking my current class which is a Grade 4 class. They use Macbooks 1:1. Actually I will go with the whole year level. Our aim is to create 39 books.

What is the Backpack Classroom? 

This is a simple idea that I had at the end of last year. It is a way to help children with limited access to technology to create a digital book and to publish it. I originally took a backpack of iPads to a remote village in Sumatra to teach the children there to create digital books. It resulted in 9 books that to date have been downloaded over 20,000 times.

So what is different this time?

This time I am taking my current class from the International school that I currently teach at. My class has Macbooks as their 1:1 devices. We will keep it simple by using Keynote and Photo Booth to record the story. 

Where are you going?

We will go to the Santi Rama School in Jakarta. This is a school for deaf children. We have chosen to visit this school as our current topic is about how we can modify messages to suit a particular audience. The books will be tri-lingual. That means that there will be 3 languages included on each page. The children from the Santi Rama school understand Indonesian. They are all deaf children and use sign language to communicate. To make the books more accessible for an international audience we will translate the stories into English. My students will act as publishers and then promote the finished books to an international audience via their blogs and other online forums. 

Where did you get the idea to go to Santi Rama?

I have been visiting this school with different classes over the years. I have always gone to see them so that my students can make new friends and learn about communicating in sign language. This time the focus will be on to help each deaf student to create a digital book that we can publish to the world for other children to read. 

How will you make it work?

The idea is for each SWA student to have a Santi Rama student partner. The Santi Rama students have been preparing for tomorrow and have already written their stories on paper and made some illustrations. My students have been learning about how to create a digital book with embedded video on each page. They have also been learning how to create digital artwork to illustrate the book.

We are really looking forward to tomorrow. More information to come after our visit.

Skitch - Why I love it

Hi there,
You you ever wanted to draw on photos and share them?
Have you ever wanted to use your Wacom Bamboo tablet to draw on a PDF easily?
Do you like to share pictures via Twitter?
Do you have Chinese or another language in your school that has a script and you want to be able to write with the characters on either photos or pdfs?

Today I found Skitch by Plasq online. It is a free program that you can download. Get it here SKITCH

I have been looking into how my school can become more paperless. We use Studywiz and it drives us to become more digital. Now with a tablet or even just the Macbook track pad - kids can write digitally on pdfs and send them back to the teacher. Imagine the possibilities ... Maths, Science, note taking directly onto pdf textbooks ... making comments on photos ... typing pinyin on pictures in Chinese lessons - wow ... there are so many possibilities.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!