iBooks

gbertoia@gmail.com

Back in 2010 I wondered about the effects that ebooks and the Ipad would have on education. Today I think we are moving away from desktops and laptops and towards tablets and I can see tools like iBooks Author accelerating the movement towards digital books. Creative, intelligent, collaborative teachers need few things but time to create meaningful lessons……… though I suppose more money and beer wouldn’t hurt. With iBook Author the creation of Ipad ready books containing lessons and course material could be easily made and distributed.

To test this out I have been placing the material I have on ePortfolios into iBooks Author. The software is intuitive and if you have used keynote or pages it feels very familiar.  Adding content such as video and graphics is a simple just drag and drop. Today I continued working on this iBook and added an interactive widget to the iBook. If you use Hype, the creation of  interactive elements is also something you could consider. I read a post on the Tummult blog site about how Hype animations could be made into Ibook Author friendly widgets.

Basically:

  • create the Hype animation
  • export as an HTML5 folder with create the folder selected
    • I call the export index so that I have less to do in the next step this also creates a folder called index
  • download the info.plist file (found on the Tummult blog site) and add it to the Hype folder, in my case index
    • edit this file so that the length and width are the same as the length and width of your Hype animation
  • add an image (default.png) for the ibook widget image to the Hype folder
  • change the folder file name by appending the name with .wdgt. in my case index.wdgt
  • I then just dragged and dropped the index.wdgt into my ibook
  • check it out on your Ipad (I use SimplyShare to move the file to my iPad then opened the file with iBooks)
Quite slick! This is an iPad screen shot of the widget on an iBook page.
The Tummult blog site has more detailed information. I added an embed of the Hype animation below, it is coming in from my dropbox so it might take a minute or two. Need to work on the text part of the animation still.

 

Portfolio articles from the beginning