eBooks Do you wish you had textbooks with images that your students could interact with? Do you have quizzes that you wish your students could do while they read their textbook? Do you wish your students could electronically capture their notes as they read? Do you wish you had image, audio, video, or even sketch pad tools to capture and generate media in the textbook? Have you ever considered ebooks?
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An ebook, and in particular an epub can integrate interactive media into books and textbooks. A simple digital book may include images, hyperlinks, and hypertext. With epub formats, we can create a book with rich interactive media like images, videos, and study features. Obvious benefits of ebooks include accessibility for students as well as enhanced user experience (CAST, 2012; Gardner, 2011). The major textbook providers, McGraw Hill, Pearson, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, all have textbooks formatted for the Apple Books Store.
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Examples Use your imagination. What kind of ebook could you write for your students? What would be an appropriate ebook for your students to write? Only you know what would be authentic to your field of study, your curriculum, and your students. To get started, consider these ideas: Visual Arts •Street art •Ballet positions •Art History •Personal eportfolio Health & Community Studies •Yoga positions •Flu prevention •Frog dissection •Human anatomy Science & Technology •Environmental sustainability •Workplace safety •Gaming history •Astronomy Business Administration •Accounting principles •Travel destinations 112
•Social marketing •Business adventures Humanities & Social Sciences •Children’s story •Classical literature •Modern languages •Graphic novel
Merits While there is little research on the efficacy of ebooks, there are some obvious benefits. Digital books have rich media with images, weblinks, and sometimes with interactive images, videos, and study features. Because we post these books online, we can connect socially with the authors. Online books work well with most assistive technologies and ereaders have built in accessibility features. Practically speaking, digital books save paper, shipping, and general costs while maintaining the most up-to-date information. One possible use of ebooks is digital storytelling which can positively impact learning. Rich Media. ePubs have so many rich media features. We can show images in 3D, panoramic, and gallery views as well as add hotspots to an image - link to deeper layer in an image, a link to website, or a trivia tidbit. Widgets allow us to embed a video or music. Additionally, we can include a quiz with feedback - we can even add a drag and drop image quiz. These epubs when read on a tablet or ereader allow students to highlight text as well as generate study notes and cards. Still yet, we can even add a sketchpad widget within our epub. Accessibility. eBooks would naturally appeal to linguistic as well as visual and auditory learners (Gardner, 2011) and be more accessible for a variety of learner types and abilities including English as a Second Language learners (CAST, 2012). Assistive technologies work well with HTML and most ereaders have built in accessibility features for the hearing and visually impaired. Some ebooks have features that allow readers to highlight and take notes, take interactive quizzes, view images in 3D, and view video. These features enhance the learning experience for any learner type. Connected Learning. With e-book sharing sites, students can post poems, short stories, books, and magazines while receiving social feedback or reviews - any time, any place, and any pace (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2012). Students can also share
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their ebook by posting a link in a discussion forum in the learning management system (LMS) for an efair. Issuu has more contemporary stylish magazine style viewbooks using Adobe portable document files (PDF). At FanFiction, one can post original works based on popular books, movies, comics, and games. With Storybird, we can write a children’s story page by page with beautiful illustrations. Not only does it have class accounts to integrate lessons and assignments, but it also has monthly writing challenges. Artists can also sell their illustrations to the site. BookBox has animated children’s ebooks in multiple languages. Your students could make a graphic novel with one of the many apps available. Sustainable. eBooks are environmentally friendly alternatives to paper-based books. Some educational ebooks are free and open source. We can avoid long printing and shipping waits for new editions to become available in our campus bookstores. Clunky traditional paper-based textbooks can outdate quickly while editors can update an ebook in an instant. Although we need to initially download an epub from the Internet, once downloaded to our tablet, we can read our book any time any place at any pace - offline. However, ebooks obtained on loan from our school libraries have limitations: they usually need to be read online, have temporary downloads, and limited circulation. Digital Storytelling. Students can tell their own stories or create narratives through an ebook. Digital storytelling is inquiry-based, problem-based, and self-directed. Being able to communicate our own journey encourages pride and dialogue communication. Storytelling can also be interdisciplinary (Skouge & Rao, 2009). Not only does digital storytelling employ the use of digital media, but it also encourages voice, creativity, and self-direction (Rossiter & Garcia, 2010).
Challenges Like any emerging technology, epub use is still catching on. Some of the software is proprietary and only works with certain systems. Ideally, students need a tablet like an iPad or a Kindle to really experience all that the technology has to offer. If we write and share these ebooks, then we need to practice Netiquette in sharing our comments in open forums. We also need to be aware of how to set our privacy settings. Digital Divide. To experience the rich features of an epub, readers generally need a mobile device like a smartphone or a tablet ereader like a Kindle or iPad. Some ebooks are proprietary and only work on a designated device. For example, iBooks Author is free 114
software for MacBooks and can create an epub only for the Apple Books Store. To create an ebook to share globally, we need to use alternative software. Optimally, students need to be in a one-to-one iPad program to maximize the use of ebooks. On the other hand, many students and professors already use mobile devices (Melton, 2014) and a smartphone or tablet is much less expensive than a laptop or desktop computer. Netiquette. Sharing our ebooks is collaborative. We can post comments on others' work as well as receive comments on our own work. Comments should be polite and friendly, respecting Netiquette (Shea, 2004). Make sure that students know how to adjust their privacy settings in public sharing sites. They may want to keep their ebook private and confidential or they may want feedback from anyone in the world.
Instructional Design Use a backwards design approach. First, start with your learning outcomes. Second, create your assessments. Third, plan your instructional activities. Finally, choose a technology to enhance the lesson. Design. Consider your curriculum; look carefully at your accreditation standards, graduate attributes, program learning outcomes, course learning outcomes, and lesson learning outcomes. Will an ebook fulfill the learning outcomes? How will you prepare students to use an ebook? What technologies will you and your students need to learn in order to create an ebook? Will ebooks enhance the learning experience? Develop. Browse the Internet for examples of ebooks in your field of study. For example, medicine has embraced epubs with 3D interactive images and videos like the Congenital Heart Disease Review. Look for the Galรกpagos by the Open University and Dr David Robinson with videos from this archipelago. Even Jessica Alba has her own epub on healthy living, The Honest Life, available on the Apple Books Store, Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook Book, or Chapters Indigo Kobo Edition. Create your own epub or ebook for your course. There are even collaborative creative common license ebooks that you can contribute to. Likewise, plan an activity where your students create an graphic novel, magazine, or story book. Browse the various technologies available for authoring. Apple users can create epubs with rich media content with iBooks Author and iAd Producer. With Apple iTunesU, you can also upload your ebook creations to your iTunesU course. To learn more, check out the iTunesU Course Manager
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Support. Note that it is possible to embed your own videos into epubs; however, to embed a YouTube hosted video, you will need third party widgets like Bookry or Bookwidgets.
Apple iBooks Author Adobe InDesign MacKiev HyperStudio
Bookry
Issuu
Blurb
Storybird
FanFiction
Deliver. Decide what students will do before, during, and after the ebook activity. Before reading an ebook, you may need to demonstrate the features of an ereader, and before creating an ebook, students may need to learn how to use the authoring software. While reading an ebook, you may have guided questions and interactive quizzes for students to follow and complete. After reading the ebook, students could participate in a discussion forum or journalling activity, and if showcasing their own ebook, you might want to set up an efair for peer sharing and critique. The ebook activity should be authentic, active, and applied.
Technology We can write our ebook in traditional productivity suites like Microsoft Word or Apple Pages. We can even export Pages as an epub. We can upload and convert simple text files to ebook sharing sites like Issuu or Blurb. We can create and share simple children’s stories on Storybird or make graphic novels with an app. However, to create really rich media content, like interactive images, videos, and quizzes, we need to create an epub using software like Apple iBooks Author, Adobe InDesign, MacKiev HyperStudio, or SoftChalk eBook Builder. We can self-publish our stories on social media sites like FanFiction or major book sharing arenas like the Apple Books Store or the Blurb Bookstore.
References Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST). (2012). Universal Design for Learning. Retrieved from http://www.cast.org/index.html Gardner, H. (2011). Frames of mind: the theory of multiple intelligences (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Basic Books. Melton, R. (2014). Mobile learning transformation: Education on-demand and with your hands - today, tomorrow, and in development. Proceedings from the Lambton College Mobile Summit 2014, Lambton College, Sarnia, ON. 116
Rossiter, M. & Garcia, P.A. (2010). Digital storytelling: A new player on the narrative field. New Directions for adult and continuing education, (126), p.37-48. Shea, V. (2004). Netiquette. Retrieved from http://www.albion.com/netiquette/book/ index.html Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a distance (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Skouge, J.R. & Rao, K. (2009). Digital storytelling in teacher education: Creating transformations through narrative. Educational perspectives, 42(1-2), p.54-60.
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