iBooks Presentations from #MACUL13

I think I may have finally recovered from the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning annual conference. As usual I was pretty busy. I ended up being involved in two different presentations, which always take a lot out of me.

Both of the presentations I was involved in were focused on the use of iBooks Author to create textbook replacements. Yes, I understand this limits me to the iPad only, but really, I don't care. I thought I'd post a quick summary including links from both talks.

Innovating with iBooks Author and Pages

This was a talk I gave with my very good friend Serge Danielson-Francois (Library Ninja). Serge and I complement each other perfectly. I tend to be frenetic and get going on an idea with a focus that can sometimes get me way off agenda. Serge on the other hand always has the long view and can help keep things moving in the right direction.

Anyway, I typically don't use PowerPoint or an alternative. I tend to present from an outline and jump between webpages and applications. You can find our complete outline and all of our links on the Google Site I set up for the presentation. When we both started the year we had a vision of how we'd use iBooks Author and what our "textbooks" would look like. This really became an exercise in reflection on our teaching. We shared our original vision and then how this has changed over the course of the year. If you'd like to see the original vision you can check out an article we wrote for the MACUL Journal, look on page 26.

Serge's vision changed the most. He originally envisioned having his journalism 2 and 3 students create a textbook for his first year students. Awesome idea! However, he's learned that journalism today is a moving target and those things that don't change rapidly are things his students would have difficulty teaching. Things like avoiding the easy headline and digging deeper to the real story. In short how to think like a journalist. He now sees his students creating a portfolio of how stories were covered this year. It will be more of a resource for the future editors of the school's online paper.

Join the iBooks Author Collaborative

I was a co-presenter with Tony DiLaura, a great guy from Zeeland Public Schools. This was the kickoff session for the upcoming iBooks Hackathon! In June we will be inviting teachers to come and learn iBooks Author and hopefully partner up with other educators to create high quality resources for use by students around the state (and beyond). We will be running basically the same session on both sides of the state. On the west side of the state we will be hosted by Kent ISD and on the east side by Wayne State University.

What we really want to do is get teachers working together collaboratively to create pieces of iBooks. This could be good text, graphics, interactive widgets, videos or other cool stuff I haven't thought of. All of these pieces could be then archived in a way that other people could take them and create custom books for their own students. However, we're running this as more of an edcamp like idea, so if our participants have a different vison then we'll go in a different direction. The big ideas are:

• Create resource to support the way individual teachers teach
• Collaboration: "Many hands make light work"
• Collaboration: Lets learn from each other. I would love to find someone who could teach me new skills or offer me better ways to reach my students.
• Share what we've made: If what I do will help other educators that would be great. I know I have skills that others don't. If I make my stuff available then they don't have to have those skills.

Interested? Wondering how you can get involved?

1. Goto our Hackathon Website for more information and to register. We are charging $30 because the number of people we can accomodate is limited and we want to help ensure those that register actually show up. (plus we're providing lunch)
2. Join our Google+ Community. We currently have people from around the state and as well as other people who've found us.

Papert's Gears

Week two of Learning Creative Learning is all about formal vs. informal learning. We started with a reading of Seymour Papert's essay, "Gears of my Childhood". It focused on his fascination with gears that started very early in his life (when he was two) with gears and how this fascination played out through his formal education. We were tasked with writing about on object from our own childhood that interested us.

I really struggled with this. I don't know that I had a similar object/experience when I was very young. In fact I find it very difficult to remember much from that time. This probably points to the fact that I didn't have any really powerful experiences like Papert's when I was very young.

The closest experience I have with an object from my childhood was the Franklin Ace 1000 computer we got in 1982, when I was 11. The Franklin Ace was a clone of the Apple II+. My brothers and I had been begging for a computer. When ever we went to K-Mart we would immediately go to the computer section of the store. Yes, K-Mart really did sell personal computers. We would play with them and write simple programs to fill the screen with things like, "Steve is COOL" or "My Brother SUCKS!" on infinite loops and then walk away. I later learned that my parents made a decision not to take the family to Florida that summer and instead to buy us a computer. From that point on I've always had a computer in my house and computers (or similar devices) have been at the center of how I work and play.

This was an incredible thing to own. We could run cool games, but more importantly I could use it to write computer programs. Now, I never really ever wrote any really complicated programs on this computer. I think I never had the sort of persistence required to do that. Maybe if I'd had badges ;). Just having it there being able to type in programs from computer magazines and see them run really gave me a sense of accomplishment. I wrote, or copied, a program and I cause something to happen on the screen. It really was kind of awesome.

It was obvious, even in the 80s that computers were going to be very important in the future. In retrospect I'm very glad that my parents chose the computer over the vacation. They were really investing in the futures of their three children. Today my older brother is an engineer, my younger brother is the Director of Technology at a high school, and I'm a physics teacher who relies on computers and the Internet as an integral part of my teaching and learning.

Learning with Technology?

So, my blog is ostensibly about Teaching with Technology, but I think I will depart from that a little and use this as I document my participation in a MOOC I'm taking being offered by the MIT Media Lab on Creative Learning.

Right now I'm watching the lecture for the first week being delivered by Mitchel Resnik. He's offering the background and justification for what he calls "Lifelong Kindergarten". In kindergarten students get to play and explore as the primary way to learn. He contends we should do this at all levels and get away from the model of education that is focused on knowledge delivery.

With new technologies that are being developed all the time we can move closer and closer to lifelong kindergarten. The main thing Resnik is talking about seems to be focused on the design and building of devices or computer programs. This reminds me to some degree of a workshop Gary Abud ran for the DMAPT on Design Thinking. It will get the students to think creatively and do some good problem solving, but unless the design challenges are very carefully crafted I'm not sure how much content a student could learn with this model.

While content is only one of the things I try to teach to my students, it is an important thing. Without the content you wouldn't be able to call my class Physics. I'm hoping this course will give me more insights on how to allow students to play and explore while still teaching the content.

I try to get my students playing and exploring quite often. One of the ways I do with is with building projects. We just finished our marshmallow catapults. I gave students a list of allowable materials and told them to build a catapult that would hurl a marshmallow into a bucket 5 meters away (Thanks @mr_pata for the idea). They had to play, discover, and build. I know they learned some important things along the way. However, they probably didn't need to rely on the physics concepts we've been learning in class nor did they develop new concepts we haven't covered yet. How do I do projects like this that teach not only the critical thinking and experimentation, but also teach physics?

I'm hoping that Learning Creative Learning will give me some insights to help answer that question.

iBooks Hackathon

I've already written a bit about iBooks Author and how awesome it is for creating resources to share with your students. I know some of you are probably rolling your eyes about now and thinking something along the lines of, "More iPads in education... When will this fad die?" Whether or not iPads in the classroom are a fad or not is really immaterial at this point. Like it or not, many schools are already or will be going one to one with them. So we should probably find the best way to use this technology to support our students.

Last year Dan Spencer put me in contact with Tony DiLaura. Tony is an educator from Zeeland Michigan. He is also excited about the potential impact of teacher created textbooks using iBooks Author. His goal is to bring educators together to collaboratively create resources that can be used to make the creation of these books easier. After some discussion the idea of the iBooks Hackathon was born.

We will officially kickoff the Hackathon at this year's MACUL conference. Then in June we will have two workshops, one on the east side of Michigan and the other on the west side. At these workshops we hope to bring educators together into groups and begin working on cool resources. Throughout the summer these groups will continue to work and in August we will take what has been created to that point and have the official launch of what will hopefully be a large collection of resources for other educators to use.

if you are interested in participating you can check out our Google+ Community as well as our page in the MI-Learning section of MACUL's website.

GeoGebra and iBooks?

If you follow my blog you know I'm a big fan of  the new iBooks and iBooks Author. What I wanted to mention today is a cool tool called GeoGebra.

"GeoGebra is free and multi-platform dynamic mathematics software for all levels of education that joins geometry, algebra, tables, graphing, statistics and calculus in one easy-to-use package. It has received several educational software awards in Europe and the USA."

 It's pretty cool. After playing with it a little I see some real potential here not only for math, but also science. Below is an interactive I made after playing for only a few minutes. It models a position time graph for an object moving with a constant velocity. You can change the Velocity or the Starting Position (xo).


It literally took me no more than ten minutes to make this having never worked with GeoGebra before. Anyway I was looking at GeoGebra as a way of creating interactive content for iBooks. Anthony DiLaura (@anthonydilaura) has been doing this already. He uses Tumult Hype to take GeoGebra output and get it into a widget for embedding in iBooks. I've come up with a slightly different way and easier way, but Anthony's way is better in some ways.

In order to put your GeoGebra Content into iBooks Author you must:

1. Download a Beta Version of GeoGebra (4.2 or 5.0) and create your interactive
2. File->Export as "Dynamic Worksheet as Webpage (html)"
3. Click on the "Export as Webpage" Button
4. Click on Advanced (near the center of the window)
5. Set width to 820 and height to 520
6. Place a checkmark in the Export to HTML5 box
7. Then Export. Save as index.html somewhere you can find it
8. Download my sample widget and unzip.
9. Replace my index.html with your index.html
10. Rename the sample folder to: your name.wdgt (Adding the wdgt will turn the folder into a widget file. You can access the individual files again by right clicking on the widget file and selecting "Show Package Contents")
11. Embed your widget in iBooks!

I should note one thing. This method will only work if you have an internet connection to the iPad when you're using it. I have been a bit daunted when it comes to making offline widgets. Check out this discussion forum if you want to try to create widgets for offline use.

There is a lot of potential in GeoGebra. Not just for me as an educator to make interactive elements for my students, but for my students to create them as well. I really wish I discovered this at the beginning of summer rather than the end...