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EdTechTeacher.org

  • Teaching for the 21st Century
    We offer technology integration workshops each summer in Boston, and we travel to schools around the country and abroad. Our 'T21' program provides cohorts of teachers the opportunity to develop their technology integration skills over a one year period.

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  • Tom Daccord in Workshop
    View Photos of Teaching with Technology Workshops & Workshop Instructors

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EdTechTeacher blog 01/31/2012

  • Hands on: iBooks Author effortless to use, but iPad-only | Macworld

    While I understand that this first iteration is designed with textbook publishers in mind—and those big books don’t exactly scale well onto the iPhone’s small screen—for others, this tool becomes yet another “extra” way to build ebooks, rather than a definitive solution. With any luck, subsequent iterations will open up these tools to iPhone books; until then, I’ll continue building ePubs in multiple programs.

    iPad-exclusivity aside, those willing to work in iBooks Author should be quite pleased. It’s the best WYSIWYG ebook designer I’ve seen on the market so far, and—formatting problems excluded—incredibly easy to work with. If you have iTunes Producer installed, you can even use the Publish button to send your finished book directly to the publishing process; you’ll still need an ISBN and an iBookstore sales account to proceed, but it’s a nice link to unify the process.

    tags: apple ibooks iauthor ipads

  • Apple Will Own Your Work With iBooks Author

    Apple’s recent iBooks Author special event revealed the changes the company plans to make in the world of publishing. While iBooks 2 is innocent enough, Author is more than it appears on the surface.

    Not only was iBooks 2 meant to open the door for textbook sales, but the Mac companion app, iBooks Author could also make the textbooks. Better yet, both apps are free.

    How could writers not like the pitch? Create your own e-books in a sleek, easy-to-use app (similar to the iWork suite), and put them into iBooks. You can add galleries, widgets, and other media to enhance your e-book.

    But as PCMag’s Sascha Segan points out, doing so is a “devil’s bargain.” Hidden within iBooks Author’s about section is the license agreement, and the very first part of it references Apple’s intentions:

    “IMPORTANT NOTE: If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore) and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple.”

    The legalese explains it too, but at least Apple was nice enough to put it into layman’s terms.

    What are the implications of this? Essentially, Apple is asking its users to help add content to iBooks. Not only that, but they will take a cut every time you sell the e-book (your “Work”). And not only that, but even if you wanted to port your work elsewhere, you can’t. As Segan writes, “Apple owns the creative process of anyone who uses [Author].”

    tags: apple ibooks iauthor ipads

  • Themeefy - Create, Curate, Publish

    create personal theme magazine

    tags: ebooks magazine tools

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January 30, 2012 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

EdTechTeacher blog 01/29/2012

  • Hands on With iBooks Author — The Digital Shift

    Apple unveiled its new interactive ebook creation tool today at a special education event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Called iBooks Author, the app is free to download from the Apple App Store, but only works on Mac OS X. Much like Apple’s productivity suite iWorks, the new authoring tool offers a number of templates that help get you started with creating the layout of her/his e-book. These six templates offer different fonts and layout styles—Contemporary, Modern Type, and Craft, for example.

    tags: epub ipads iauthor ibooks

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January 28, 2012 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

EdTechTeacher blog 01/28/2012

  • Creating ePub files with Pages

    To learn more about using the ePub format and get a better feel for how a Pages document might appear as a book in iBooks, it’s a good idea to download the “ePub Best Practices” sample document. After reading the guidelines and instructions within the document, you can use it as a template to create your own document. You can also import the styles from the sample document into a new document you create. 

    Download the “ePub Best Practices” sample document at the following web address:

    tags: epub pages ipads ibooks

  • sigil - A WYSIWYG ebook editor. - Google Project Hosting

    Sigil is a multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor. It is designed to edit books in ePub format.

    tags: epub ebook editor opensource sigil iPad

  • Holding out for an ePub hero | Computerworld India

    Against my better judgment, I let myself get swept up by the wave of e-publishing rumors in the days leading up to Apple’s education-themed announcement. Apple could do it, I thought to myself. The company had both the resources to build a great tool, and the reasons to do so.

    The application Apple did release, iBooks Author, is impressive in some ways. It’s free. Textbook publishers, teachers, comic artists, and others seeking an easy way to make rich, fixed-format iPad books should be thrilled. As Macworld editorial director Jason Snell points out, it will save a lot of people from having to create a dedicated app just to serve beautiful versions of their content.

    But there are perhaps just as many caveats and concerns with Apple’s new application. The iBooks Author end user licensing agreement is vague and worrisome. Like every program that came before iBooks Author, you can’t edit ePubs directly; unlike programs such as Scrivener, Pages, and InDesign, however, this app’s only purpose is to make books. And to top it all off, it won’t even export the open ePub format Apple has long championed; instead, it makes proprietary .ibooks files.

    tags: epub iPads

  • Education To The Farthest Reaches - FaR Learning Design: January Winner

    My vote for this month’s “FaR (Farthest Reaches) Learning Design” winner is Gooru Learning out of Palo Alto. Just this past week they overhauled their “Free Resources Curation” tool by adding personalized study road maps and social learning features to better fit the needs of the individual as early as 5th grade up through high school.

    tags: gooru blog

  • Teachers 'flip' their lectures, homework to reach more students - The York Daily Record

    Henning is one of several York County educators who have adopted the "flipped classroom" model of teaching.
    It essentially means swapping what's traditionally done at home and in class. Content that would have been covered by lecture in class is

    From the left, Chase Taylor and Allie Smith discuss a physics problem projected on a screen with teacher Derrick Henning last month at Spring Grove Area High School. In the "flipped classroom," students do what would traditionally be "homework" in the classroom and may watch a lecture via video stream at home. (Daily Record/Sunday News -- Paul Kuehnel)
    covered by video at home. Problems that would have been assigned as homework are done in class with the teacher there to help.
    The concept has grown popular recently. While it's now increasing as a teaching technique in kindergarten through grade 12, partly because of more access to technology, the idea has been around for some time in higher education, said Francis Eberle, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association.

    tags: flip

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January 27, 2012 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

EdTechTeacher blog 01/24/2012

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EdTechTeacher blog 01/22/2012

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EdTechTeacher blog 01/15/2012

  • mathfuture - Karismath

    "During the event, Shad Moarif, the founder of Karismath, will lead brainstorming about mathematical videos and dynamic mathematics in general."

    tags: math karismath

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January 14, 2012 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

EdTechTeacher blog 01/05/2012

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EdTechTeacher blog 01/03/2012

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EdTechTeacher blog 12/28/2011

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December 27, 2011 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

EdTechTeacher blog 12/20/2011

  • South Shore Innovation: Innovation

    "South Shore Innovation is focused on developing a stronger innovation and startup community on the South Shore of Boston. This includes hosting innovation round tables, educational and learning activities, showcase events, and anything else we can think of that will promote innovation and support startups and an entrepreneurial culture in the area. A corollary to our mission is to connect innovation and entrepreneurial centers throughout the Boston area and Massachusetts. We highly value Science, Technology, Education, the Arts and anything else innovative, whether for-profit or non-profit. We promote and support small and growing business success. "

    tags: innovation southshore

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December 19, 2011 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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