Ebook moments

Recently I've been spending sometime creating ebooks so that I can reference some of my ICT planning when I am out and about. I rather like the ebook format partially as I find reading from the screen in a virtual book format quite pleasing (I taught myself to read from the screen comfortably some time ago) and also because, in many cases, you can make notes in the ebook as you go along. When I showed this format to Brent I rather opened up a can of worms as he also got rather excited and now wants some help and support in this area!

So, what's new? Creating an ebook is nothing new. However, creating an ebook directly from the iPad is. Enter the 'book creator' app. This app allows you to create an ebook whilst in the iPad and send directly to iBooks. You can use text, photos etc to create the ebook of course but the great thing for me is that pretty much any note taking app on the iPad allows you to store the notes to your photos and then easily import into the book creator app. Thus, I can easily create an ebook of all my notes, plans and thoughts and then keep this running record in iBooks and reference it easily. There are limitations of course, eg the ebook created this way can't currently then have notes appended to it (as other ebooks can have) but I am hopeful that this will come in future releases.

In the classroom you could create ebooks with students very quickly and easily and they could create their own running record of their notes and work that could be read back in iBooks. As a teacher it would be easily possible to create an ebook of all the terms worksheets or notes in your computer and then have them preloaded onto an ebook reader ready for students to reference.

Ask if you need support or want a lesson on how to do this.

Andy

Changes, changes and more changes !

What a busy few months we've had. ICT have released a number of new services for the college including:

• a new Parental Portal (passwords will be going out to parents and caregivers very soon) which students can also use with their Hagley logons. You can get to the portal to check your attendance, NCEA points etc etc via learning@hcc (http://lms.hagley.school.nz:2010/index.php) and clicking on the Parents drop down menu or simply going to the school website at http://www.hagley.school.nz and clicking on the parents tab
• a new booking service for parent's evenings
• a campus wide wireless access service that will gradually be opened up for students to use their own devices to support their learning at Hagley

Changes, upgrades and improvements will continue to happen over the next few months so watch this space !!

Andy