Tag: iBooks author

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Class 10: Hosting #sschat / Get Started with iBooks Author

page 288 of Baltimore and Ohio employees magazineWe’re very proud that our EdMethods class has been selected to host #sschat on the Twitters – Nov 3, 2014 4-5 PM (Pacific) That night is election eve ’14 and our topic will be very timely – “Teaching Politics, Controversy and Civic Engagement.” For more on our chat questions click here.

After the Twitter chat raps up, we’ll spend some time debriefing on the experience.

Class DBQ iBook
Next up, we’ll get started with our iBooks Author training. Over the next few weeks we will use our DBQ projects to create a collaborative iBook. As a group, the class will review each other’s work before inclusion in the iBook collection of DBQs. Each student (or team) will contribute one DBQ in the form of a book chapter. It will include the project reflection as a way of introducing the DBQ.

Technical aspects
The iBooks will be designed using iBooks Author in the Mac lab. Students will bring digital versions of their DBQs to the lab – including all image and sound files, text files, citations and URLs. Here’s a quick guide to managing your files to get ready for iBooks Author: Get Started with IBA

Note: YouTube videos will be added to the iBooks using ibooksgenerator. All you need to have is the URL of the video.

For more see:

Assignment:

Next week we will have a visitor from the Classroom Law Project who will share law-related educational resources and guide us through a mock trial activity.

  • We will argue the case of Vickers v Hearst (443kb PDF) so be sure to read the case in advance.
  • To “learn the rules” read this guide Mock Trial Rules of Evidence (185kb PDF).
  • If you have never participated in a mock trial you may wish to look at this material that explains the various roles of attorney and witness  The People v Carter (2.4mb PDF)

Image credit: page 288 of “Baltimore and Ohio Railroad employees magazine” (1912)

Identifier: baltimoreohioemp01balt
Title: Baltimore and Ohio employees magazine
Year: 1912 (1910s)

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Class 7: Teaching with Documents

I is for India

I is for India,
Our land to the East
Where everyone goes
To shoot tigers, and feast

Common Core offers an incentive for teachers to use historic documents to build literacy skills in a content area while empowering students to be the historian in the classroom. But document-based (DBQ) instruction in this context requires four key elements to be successful:

  1. The right documents.
  2. Knowing how to look at them.
  3. Letting students discover their own patterns, then asking students to describe, compare and defend what they found.
  4. Basing the task on enduring questions, the kind that students might actually want to answer.

Class 7 offers strategies for assisting students to more closely read a document (in all their multimedia formats) by answering three Common Core questions.

  1. What did it say?
  2. How did it say it?
  3. What’s it mean to me?

Here’s a 1.3 MB pdf handout of my slide deck

Your best example of a DBQ is Progress and Poverty in Industrial America a pdf version of iBook below. It uses 11 documents, which is a bit more than I expect for your DBQ.

Next our class examined three sample iBooks. The first is my DBQ iBook “Progress and Poverty in Industrial America.” Next we looked at “Exploring History: Ten Document-Based Questions” an iBook designed by my fall ’13 EdMethods class. Finally we looked at my latest iBook, “Portland’s Japantown Revealed.” ~ All iBooks free at iTunes.

Assignment:
Students will design their own DBQ. Assignment (note – various due dates)

Examples of DBQ style questions

Page from: “An A B C, for baby patriots”
Creator: Ames, Mary Frances
Publisher: Dean & Son
Place of Publication: London (160a Fleet Street E.C.)
Publication Date: [1899]
Archive: University of Florida UF00086056:00001

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We Published an iBook!

Exploring_HistoryJust published at iTunes: Exploring History: Ten Document-Based Questions. 98 pages filled with interactive widgets and videos.

Download free at iTunes and be sure to give us a star rating and / or a review.

Ten engaging questions and historic documents empower students to be the historian in the classroom. The units draw from a fascinating collection of text and multimedia content – documents, posters, photographs, audio, video, letter and other ephemera. “Stop-and-think” prompts based on CCSS skills guide students through analysis of the primary and secondary sources. Essential questions foster critical thinking. All documents include links back to the original source material so readers can remix the content into their own curated collections

It’s a great resource for use in the classroom, and it serves as a model for teacher or student curation of historic content into interactive digital DBQ’s. For more on the content design, click here. For more on how we used iBooks Author, click here.

American and World History chapters include:

  1. “Red Scare Propaganda” by Kristi Convissor and Christina Steiner
  2. “Anne Frank: A Timeless Story” by Erin Deatherage
  3. “Easter: Irish Uprising 1916” by Peter Gallagher
  4. “Images and Emotion: WWII Propaganda” by Aram A. Glick
  5. “Music and the Anti-War Movement of the 1960s” by Samuel T.S. Kelley,
  6. “Cross-Cultural Contact: Native American and European” by Tom Malone
  7. “Visions of Freedom: The American Revolution” by Collin Soderberg-Chase
  8. “The Fight for Civil Rights: Women’s Suffrage in Visual Media” by Heather Treanor and Cory Casanova
  9. “The Power of Propaganda” by Kyle Stephens
  10. “Media and War: An Analysis of Vietnam War Propaganda” by Damian Wierzbicki.
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Class 14: Proofing our iBook

McGuffey's Reader

Here’s our workflow for collaborating on an iBook showcase of student designed DBQs.

During the last class session students used their prewritten text, selected images and video, they used about 2 hours of lab time to complete their chapters. They shared their chapter files and following class, I compiled their chapters into a single iBook and we use some class time to critique and see how chapters fit together. See draft iBook file here. (12.6MB pdf) Note: it still needs a cover, introduction and much editing.

I’ve arranged to have the iBooks draft file loaded on to iPads for the students to use. In Class 14 we will proof the draft and collectively design a cover and intro. After some final edits, I’ll upload to iTunes. Net result a student publication in just a few hours of lab time (with all research and writing done in advance)

Image credit: McGuffey’s Reader illustration n.d.
Miami University Library: nn-1351