During term 3 all of our year one students created their own iBooks during their Unit of Inquiry about Story telling.  The central idea for their Unit was

People communicate the past, present and make-believe in different forms of story-telling

The students wrote and illustrated their stories in their exercise books and then used our new iPads to create digital versions.  Of couse, the students were very excited about using the iPads for this purpose and picked up the necessary skills very quickly.

The students used the popular Book Creator app to create their iBooks.  Book creator is a simple and intuitive iBook creator and students were able to easily add titles, text, photos of their illustrations and were able to format them nicely with background colour and different fonts.  When the iBooks were completed the students then used the voice recording facility to record themselves reading the entire book and this was really the icing on the cake.

At the end of the term, the student’s families were invited to come and see and hear the iBooks being presented in the classrooms.  An iPad was connected to the Interactive White Board in the classroom and the students were able to showcase their completed eBook to everyone, using the iBooks app.

Challenges

The Book Creator app was fantastic and the students were easily able to use most of the functionality of the app.  The three main challenges with this exercise were

1. Helping the students type their story with the on-screen keyboard.  Some had difficulty finding the uppercase letters on the keyboard because most of their handwriting is in lowercase.   (To complicate things further, once they press the uppercase letter on the keyboard it appears in lower case in the text field)
2. Finding a quite place to record the voice narration.
3. Sharing the completed iBook with parents who don’t have an iPad, iPod touch, iPhone etc.  iBooks are stored in the .epub format and I was unable to find a suitable .epub reader for Windows.  As a compromise, we sent the parents a pdf version of the story but the limitation with pdf format is that it does not contain any audio.

Examples

Tegan’s iBook

Tegan’s iBook – (Open in iBooks)
Tegan’s Book – (pdf format, no audio)

Will’s iBook

Will’s iBook – (Open in iBooks)
Will’s Book – (pdf format, no audio)