Interactive Maps with Keynote and Gimp

When people are learning to make iBooks with iBooks Author they often want to have cool widgets for their students to interact with. As I've shown in previous posts, you can create some pretty easily with Keynote. I really like showing teachers how to use Keynote to do this because if they use a Mac they already have it. When you couple this with a free image editor, Gimp, you can do some really cool stuff.

The example here is not one I've used to teach my students, but one I used at last year's iBookHack. From a teaching standpoint it might not be very good, I'm not really sure since I don't teach social studies. It's just an example of how you might create an interactive map to use with your students. The first video below walks you through using Gimp to create your maps. The second shows you how to use Keynote to bring them together as an interactive widget you can drop into an iBook.

Interactive Practice Widget Built in Keynote

I've been involved in iBooks Author teacher training with Anthony DiLaura for a few years now. You can find out about our hackathon coming up this summer at the ibookhack site.

While working on the iBookHack project I've gotten to meet some amazing educators. One of these is Tara Maynard. Tara saw a cool HTML5 math practice widget in an iBook and she wondered if it would be possible to put something like it in her own books. I showed her how she might reproduce the basic idea of the widget in Keynote and she went on to create this great template. She has shared it so you can use it as a starting point for your own practice widget. If you need a little help you can check out my video below.

The problem is shown, if there are accessibility concerns a button is included that will read the problem aloud to the student. Each problem can provide a hint to help aid students in independent practice and finally the solution is provided so students can get instant feedback to see if they were correct. Since it is made in Keynote the problem, hints, or solution can include pictures or videos as well. Overall it is a great interactive element to include in an iBook and doesn't take a lot of technical skills to implement.

The core idea of this widget centers on creating a "Links Only" presentation in Keynote. If you need a little more information on this you should check out another video I made, which is also included below.

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...