I just spent the last two days in a room full of educators!  We experimented, we talked, and we planned on how we would be implement iPads in our classroom next year.  Fun times, at least for me.  Thanks to Bruce Ahlborn I learned about some great ways to create resources for my students via Quicktime and Pages.  One of things that I’m really excited about is the ePub.

An ePub is a document that you can create in Pages and then export to iBooks.  The layout needs to be fairly simple but you can include text, images, audio clips, movie clips, and screenshots.   We came up with several ideas for this format including;

• Study guides for difficult math concepts that have clips of lessons embedded.
• Differentiated texts for comprehension instruction that offer varied levels of scaffolding via teacher video and audio prompts.
• Resource creation for units that we have had difficulty finding resources for.

The Apple website has a nice page that gives the details and system requirements here.  One thing I did was download their template and just replace my own text with theirs.  That way I didn’t have to worry about formatting.

Formatting can be an issue with the ePubs as it needs to be quite simple.  Liz Castor over at Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis has written a nice post that details some of the finer points of this formatting.

I will say that it took some experimenting to get it right.  But I can’t wait to get started making some ePubs for my class.