iBooks Author - First Impressions

I downloaded iBooks Author as soon as it was released. I have been writing books in the classroom for a number of years but I have never properly published them. My books are always about the current learning. Mostly they tell the story of the current inquiry.

You can read here about the Publishing Group that I am working on at my school.

Originally I wrote books with Microsoft Publisher. This worked well enough as these books were just for printing off on a colour photocopier. I was able to master the double sided printing (short edge binding as I prefer landscape not portrait). I was able to then take the printed pages and cover to a local binder and get them made up into hard cover books.

Then I moved to an Apple school so I used Pages, Keynote and Comic Life to make my books. I am an Elementary teacher so I prefer Keynote as I use large photos and very little text. The Keynote file can be easily exported as a PDF and then the book can be printed via Preview.

I was easily able to sync these PDF books to my iPad. I have also worked with creating ePubs in Pages. I must admit I got a little frustrated with this as I had little control over the layout. I believe that layout is the most important part in an Elementary school book. I tend to keep a certain layout in my books and with ePub the pictures need to be Inline which limits the overall look.

Now for iBooks Author ...
I am impressed - hands down! It's like Apple knew what I needed. iBooks Author is a combination of Keynote and Pages. You can also easily copy/paste from Comic Life as well.

Most importantly you get TOTAL control over the layout.

I love using the widgets. I have tried the Interactive picture widget and the 3D image widget with a lot of success! Here is a screen capture from my first book. This one is in Indonesian. My children are helping me to write it. I hope to finish soon and even try to send it to the iBookstore. Who knows - maybe I'll get to actually publish this one?

Our Class eBook

Technology is alive and well with our students!



Today we put the finishing touches on our eBook.

Here is a photo of our class editors Shereen and Keaton working on compiling all of the student work into the book. Every student in the class wrote a chapter for this book. Shereen and Keaton asked the class to email their finished work in Pages so that they could put it all together. These two students then collated all the work and made it into the finished book. Initially we wanted to make an ePub format but we had trouble controlling the layout as we had a lot of pictures to include in the book. This book is all about our class inquiry into rice. Most of the content for this book has come from primary resources. We used only a few references from the Internet.

We agreed to make it into a PDF so that the students could have greater control over the layout. Take a look at the finished work here via Issu.

Open publication - Free publishing - More grade 5